Before Kindness

by Jenny Morelli

Image credit: Dan Meyers on Unsplash

Before you know kindness,

you must know cruelty,

that weed that sprouts

like darkness before dawn,

like stem before bulb.

To know kindness

is to witness cruelty,

to reach through it

without flinching,

without hesitation.

To know kindness

is to endure cruelty,

to suffer through it

without losing hope,

without losing the spark

that keeps you alive.

To know kindness

is to never turn your back

on the cruel, to always keep

one eye open while still stoking

your ferocious flame.

To know kindness is to love

the righteous and the wretched

despite their erred humanity,

is to forgive as if divine, is to protest

too much, is to walk miles

before you sleep is to count

the ways you’ll show your love

is to never stop for death,

even when he reaches for your hand

and bows; is to be the master

of your own fate, is to know

all the yous you’ve ever been,

the slave as well as her master,

the murderer and the murdered,

the stalker and the stalked

the predator and the prey.

You can only know kindness

once you’ve walked all the walks

in every type of shoe, held the whip

and the balm that healed the tear,

held the knife and the stitch

for the slash, held the bullet

and the staple for the puncture.

Too often, I want to hide,

want to rest, want to wait

for this all to go away,

but when I look up, the sky

is still there, the sun

is still shining, the grass

is still growing, the buds

are still popping, the rose

is still a rose. Weather

still changes. Babies

are still born. The deer

still come to my yard

with the squirrels, birds

and bees, so I can’t turn away.

I won’t give up

when there’s still so much beauty

to embrace, so much light

to burn this darkness.

I know kindness

as an eternal joy, an experience

through words, a geyser

in the spring of hope. Kindness

is to both be and not to be,

to be hopeful, but also dismayed

to fuel our hope, to fuel

the long journey ahead of us

and because we’ve known kindness,

we will never go gentle

into the night. We will always fight,

kicking and screaming,

until the morning sun

rises once more.

***

Jenny Morelli

Jenny Morelli is a high school English teacher who lives in New Jersey with her husband and cat. She is often either inspired by her students or else they're triggering memories in her of when she was young and struggling with her self-confidence. She has been published in a number of literary magazines, including Spare Parts for a novel excerpt, Spillwords for several themed poems, and Bottlecap Press for her own chapbook This is Not a Drill.