By Sam Yau
An angel visits me in a dream, says,
Come. I will show you faces:
A homeless veteran is curled up on a street corner.
He relives his battle; comrades fall around him.
Flashbacks come one after the other like beads on a string.
He morphs into my son, who suffered
from PTSD for years and took his life at 27.
My eyes swell with teary love for him.
The girl I was infatuated with when I was a shy
fifteen-year-old wanders down the aisle of a grocery store.
I never had the courage to tell her how I felt.
Tenderness ripples across the pond of my heart,
fresh as the first time I laid eyes upon her.
A child chases swirling clouds along a hill’s ridge.
Her face lights up at the sight of a heart-shaped rock.
Brilliant red camellias fill her with wonder.
Pine trees aglow with fondness twinkle
at her, gleam in her eyes.
A volunteer dries and clothes the shivering body of a
fragile blind, mute, and deaf old man with tender care
at Mother Teresa’s mission in Calcutta.
He guides the stranger-brother to the dining room and the
elder’s face is transfigured into the luminous face of Jesus.
A mother folds her baby’s clothes in the laundry room.
She holds the soft terry against her face and
imagines looking into the eyes of her baby in her arms.
Love remembers, waits behind every eye on every face,
within every flower and every tree.
Our deepest losses crack our hearts open,
a heart connection impregnates life with meaning,
our world is held within the gaze between mother and child,
the mundane is unmasked as sacred,
divinity is all around.
Painting by Olena Zavakevych