Poetry has always been my access to God, a constant dance with the Holy Spirit where I watch her move and sway with her. Maybe she is the willow in this poem, the one who didn’t answer in words but stayed. While reading, carry what rings true, leave the rest, and trust that God shows up in the unexpected and the ordinary.

A Question Left in My Notes App

I’ve never been good at asking questions. Sometimes I think I’m more socially inept than I appear. There are moments when my brain can’t summon curiosity into a coherent thought—only small noises of agreement that gesture toward interest without fully arriving there. Thankfully, grace exists.

Grace shows up in pauses, in people who don’t rush me, in questions that wait without demanding. It gives me time to circle back to what I couldn’t say when it mattered, and permission to answer later, differently, or not at all.

And somehow, in time, I’ve finally been able to answer Your question.

You once asked me if the willows could hear my cries.  Or maybe You asked me if they watched me weep.  Maybe You just asked me if I saw the willows. 

Time evades me these days. 

But the willows did hear and watch and I watched them –
Blurry and unrecognizable as each leaf dared to catch every drop.

As if telling me these memories I am trying to shed are more precious than I think. 

Their quiet palms turned upward, soft green vessels gathering what I wish not to birth. 

Even broken and weary, the leaves still listened – 
Trembling only when the wind asked what burden they held. 

You ask me–
Did the leaves whisper back to you? 
Flowing, flailing, flipping – the leaves did what only they could do.

I cried. They gathered and grew. 
Words weren’t what I heard nor what I wanted. 
Still they stayed. 

So let me not answer You now. 
Let me stay with the asking.

Let me learn from the willows how to hold without gripping, how to receive without naming,
how to be useful simply by remaining. If the leaves spoke, it was not in syllables
but in patience— in the long practice of staying attached while knowing how to let go.

They did not flinch at the salt. They did not hurry the fall. 
They trusted gravity more than clarity, season more than explanation.

And maybe that is what Your question did— not seeking a reply
but making a place where sorrow could land and not be wasted.
So I will stand here with You, under branches that remember water, under a sky that does not rush healing.

When the wind comes again, we will not rush to call it meaning.
We will listen for what can be carried and what must be leaving. 
– And maybe the answer isn’t something I can offer in the same language the question was asked. Maybe it needs to arrive more plainly, without a metaphor to carry it.

I don’t know if the willows heard me in any way that can be proven. But I know I was not alone while I cried. I know there was something steady enough to receive what I couldn’t hold, something that did not turn away or ask me to be different than I was. What mattered wasn’t whether the leaves whispered back, but that they stayed—open, present, unafraid of what fell into their care.

So if this is my answer, it’s this: Your question gave me a place to be honest without performing clarity. It let grief exist without needing to be solved. And in that space, I learned that being witnessed—by You, by the willows, by time itself—was enough.

with gratitude, 
kaylee