What I Owe You

I came to you like a drought comes to a field,

not meaning harm, but taking all the same,

drinking from the well you'd dug with your own hands

and calling it nourishment, calling it love.

I was hollow then, a drum with no hide stretched across it.

You struck me gently, expecting a beautiful sound,

and I gave you only the echo of someone leaving.

I won't say I didn't know.

Some part of me saw you giving

and I kept taking anyway.

I could give you a hundred reasons.

That I was drowning is one.

But it is not an absolution.

You were not a riverbank I had the right to climb

and leave eroded.

I think of the Three Sisters,

corn, beans and squash, each one holding up the others,

each one giving back what it takes.

I did not honour that.

I leaned on you like the beans on the corn

and gave you no nitrogen, no shade, nothing to grow on.

If you carry doubt now where trust used to live,

if you flinch at kindness

or measure the next person's warmth for its price,

that is mine to answer for.

I will not ask you to forget it

or hurry your healing to ease my conscience.

But I need you to know

that in the long winter of that year,

you were the first fire I'd seen in months.

Your patience was a hand

lifted out of cold water.

You reminded me I had a pulse,

that the seeds in me were sleeping, not dead.

Something in me has begun to sprout.

It has your fingerprints all over it,

though you never asked for credit,

I always took too much without asking.

So here is my tobacco, offered with open hands.

Here is the truth without its softening.

I am sorry for the weight I left with you.

I am grateful for the breath you gave me.

Both are real, and neither erases the other.

I will carry them, one in each hand,

and walk more carefully now,

leaving the ground better than I found it.