summer of love

summer of love
over fear
summer of park slope prayers
and heat waves that passed us by
like the angel of death over blood-stained posts
summer of gut punches
and choking down food and sometimes
a gelato bowl scraped empty
summer of fear
over love
summer of 3 am phone calls
and a great blank in my poetry document
like the inhale between thunder and lightning
summer of running into
instead of running away and sometimes
standing still to find myself surprisingly held
summer of love and fear
summer of crying over YouTube videos
and new tapestries on my walls
like a banner over me declaring
love
at the beginning
the last word
in every middle moment
love
when I felt most confused
when I first messed up
when I could only ask for help
I ran into the waves on shores in several states
and found in every place the same grace upon grace
the summer I learned
that God is actually really truly unconditionally
here
with me
in me
I put so much faith in fog
that I forgot lighthouses are built
to pierce through it
and the ships are never blamed
for the storm,
only saved,
every time
again and again
the waves,
the book said,
passed over our heads
but always
we were saved
by the love
that speared fear
through the heart
it was the summer
of love

I always run out of poetry in the summer. Maybe it's because I'm coming off of the crunch of April, when I write a poem a day. Maybe it's because everything is hot and sluggish, and there's none of the drama of new spring or dusky autumn to spark my creativity. I prefer to think it's because the days are long and full and I'm out living, storing up all these experiences and sensations to stuff my poems full of in the slower days to come.

So in summer, I scour through my Google doc of poetry drafts, looking for ones that will say something true today, no matter when they were written. This one I wrote last September reflecting on last summer, but it's a pretty good description of this summer too. Last summer was hard in ways this one is not. Many of its anxieties have smoothed over, like broken beer bottles into childsafe sea glass. New waves crest high in front me—again, again, I stand before them on swirling sand and am asked to trust that I will be taught to swim. It’s that C.S. Lewis quote I have always loved from Perelandra:

“He gave me no assurance. No fixed land. Always one must throw oneself into the wave.”

I was saying to a friend today that I'm tired of having to trust God. My arm pain has flared up again, rather ironically just as I share my Plough article all about what I've learned from chronic pain. And it feels like jumping into the waves again, not sure what this will mean for my summer, for my upcoming move, for all the good things I want and need to do before then. I miss the unconscious ease of self-sufficiency. I miss not needing to beg God for help for the smallest things.

Then again, when things are easy, I miss the feeling of needing Him.

Every summer has its anxieties, and the only assurance is that the waves will keep on coming. But the grace that also comes like waves upon waves—that has been the story of my summers too. Fear is like an undertow, and it can drag you under in less than a breath. But listen, you know what to do when you get caught in the current: you let it take you out until it has exhausted itself, because fear is never as totalizing as you think it is, and then, floating atop the wideness of the far-out sea, so much vaster than these tiny tides, you turn your body and swim parallel to the shore you know is still there. You make it home.

So here, halfway through summer 2025, let’s throw ourselves into the waves. Again. Because love always has the final word.

to staying awake—

Aberdeen

P.S. The book the poem references is Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. Everyone should read it.

P.P.S. I’ve been playing this song on repeat from John Mark McMillan’s wonderful new album Cosmic Supreme. I can’t get over this chorus:

And all the years will find us
In the harbor of Your kindness
All the ties that bind us
In the house of your affections