My best friend convinced me to participate in a project combining my poems with her photographs.  I sent her this poem and she found the perfect photograph to go with it.

Lifted gently from my bed,

I dangle in your arms

safe and peaceful

riding dreams of breezy nonchalance

inside acorns of emotion.

Tiny kernels of light

speck frozen in vision’s grasp

just on the edge of horizon

the edge of reality

the edge of self.

A merging of wellness

and pain, fate and chance…

simplified seconds that

encapsulate infinity

between beats of my heart.

Each outward breath fills the universe

with life, spaces out the stars,

until the drawing in again

collapses solar systems,

visits death on the unsuspecting.

And as I lay me down you keep

my soul, my LORD,

my love in sleep.

-Rebekah J. Marshall

Photograph by Erica Smith. http://thebitties.squarespace.com/new-blog/