Arms Full - A Poem of Gratitude

A PoSARC reader wrote to us a few days ago, telling us how grateful she was for having found us, for our advocacy on behalf of partners and for the POSA Support Group Meetings that acknowledge she's not a co-addict, she's a trauma survivor of a multiple-decade-long marriage filled with her sex addict's deception. She's grateful her healing has begun now, and she wanted to gift us this poem.

We would like to share it with all our PoSARC readers in gratitude to all of you this Thanksgiving. We are continually inspired by the courage, determination and resilience we witness in partners of sex addicts every single day.

Happy Thanksgiving…..and thank you for this gift, RL in California!!

Arms Full
by Rebecca del Rio

Gratitude means showing up on life's doorstep,
love's threshold, dressed in a clown suit,
rubber-nosed, gunboat shoes flapping.
Gratitude shows up with arms full of wildflowers,
reciting McKuen or the worst of Neruda.

To talk of gratitude is to be
the fool in a cynic's world.

Gratitude is pride's nightmare,
the admission of humility before something
given without expectation or attachment.
Gratitude tears open the shirt
of self importance, scatters buttons
across the polished floors of feigned indifference,
ignores the obvious and laughs out loud.

Even more, gratitude bears her breasts, rips open
her ribs to show the naked heart, the holy heart.
What if that sacred heart is not, after all, about sacrifice?
Imagine it is about joy, barefoot and foolhardy,
something unasked for, something unearned.

What if the beat we hear, when we are finally quiet is simply this:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Image by Brad Oliphant