The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
~Georgia Douglas Johnson “The Heart of a Woman” from The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems

Some mornings I’m not sure what else to do with my worry,
so I fling my tender heart out ahead of me, hoping
I might eventually catch up with it
to bring it back home before nightfall.

Sometimes it is a race to see
if anyone else rescues it first
or if someone even notices it out there
fluttering its way through the day,
trying to stay aloft.

Perhaps, in its lonely flight,
it will try winging its way home
and there I’ll find it patiently waiting for me
on the doorstep as I return empty-handed.