Though still young, she has lived at least a lifetime’s worth of anxiety before arriving to me.
Muscles tense, eyes and ears constantly alert,
mind three steps ahead working out how to protect herself.
It had long been solely her responsibility to make it through one moment and into the next.
Learning to share that burden is a tenuous process.
Sometimes it seems we are getting nowhere,
but then the quiet part of my mind recognizes how genuinely eager
she is to greet me in the field,
how sometimes we can communicate off of the subtlest shift in my weight-
almost just a thought, a movement of energy.
“Have grace,” she sighs, “for both of us.”
