As old containers fall away,
we each may find
we’re more cohesive
than we knew,
and now, no longer blocked off
from the places where
we always longed to grow,
we’ll send our shoots out
bold and green

We’ll be so much more wild and thick
than how we had been told
we had to be,
we’ll twine with others
who had been forbidden,
we’ll make a thicket, a collective tree

And we’ll hold ourselves together
not by rules and condemnation,
but by the gracious tendrils of our truth.

©Wendy Mulhern
February 5, 2017