More than we can bear

What is more than we can bear?

For we have no choice but to go on.

Trauma, violence, loss.

Holocaust, genocide;

and yet we must live.

With horrible truths,

More horrible than we should experience.

Each loss is still a loss.

Each heartbreak, still the raw and tender

ground of being.

I don’t know, don’t understand,

But those who transcend it,

Who find some meaning or truth,

Are better than I, who still dreams

Of my lost one returning to me.

Of the palpable joy of his scent, his physical presence.

What evolutionary advantage could this possibly confer,

To live with absence,

With knowing our frailty and our strength,

The incessant beat of a heart,

That cannot stop loving,

Cannot divorce the feeling of a life moving within,

With the reality that it is no more.