Emily Heilman

We started being human

I swallowed all 

my sticks and stones,

so as to stop giving my

enemies back their weapons. 

And when I stopped,

I saw how they would bleed,

and bleed, still swinging, 

empty hands and bloody fists—

I started handing them

band-aids and gauze

for their scratches and scrapes.

We found new ways to live, still broken.

I started saying I’m sorry

and I started being sorry.

I started being human

so we started being human.

We picked up. We brushed each other off.

There were things to be said, and 

we were finally saying them.

We were free.

With that freedom, we could go.

We could fill our lives with mercy,

with the image of God, forgiving.

We spread faster than our disease.

When my solemn heart was filled

and whole, there were places to go,

places we had built from

all our sticks and stones.

The Bells at dusk

You can hear the bells at dusk

over the matte glazed hills of the French Alps.

Cattle clanging, clamoring on toward pasture.

A transient fame entices them on the night wind 

coming down from the mountains,

cooled by distant white peaks, unreachable.

What truly little progress they make toward snowy stars

is, we hope, meaningful, or else we ever remain optimistic.

Yet the bells ring in dark stillness toward one destination:

loud with denial, the cattle carry on toward pasture.

Emily Heilman is a Minneapolis-based storyteller, grateful to have had opportunities to explore her faith and vocation in writing through fellowships with the Consortium of Christian Study Centers and Anselm House at the University of Minnesota. She’s been published in The Tower, Loomings Magazine, and Between Cities.