In graceful ways we start to learn
the things we need to know—
sovereignty, surrender,
how the two go hand in hand:
we surrender our enslavement
to be sovereign

And though it seems, at times,
like a hard, hard choice
(because we clung so long to this?
because we didn’t know another way?)
we get to make it
in little increments,
tiny pebbles dislodged from the facade
that had encased us,
till the whole thing crumbles down
and we find
that we can move
in ways we thought we only maybe dreamed

We can stretch out,
we can expand
so far beyond the former surface,
gracefully,
for this is ours to own.

©Wendy Mulhern
November 7, 2015