Sara

I found you in the lilies
Where the purple flowers grew,
A little life abandoned there,
And I didn’t know what to do.
So I carried you home in a cardboard box,
Found a bottle small enough,
I thought that I was saving you—
I didn’t know you’d come to save my love.

I called you Mars, you seemed so strange,
Like a visitor from afar,
Little hands and a winding tail,
I didn’t know who you were.
You purred against my beating heart,
You’d curl beneath my chin,
Then somehow you said, *My name is Sara,*
And that’s when you came in.

Sara, you opened up my soul,
Showed me love I’d never known.
There are doors inside the human heart
We don’t know we’ve closed.
We draw a line around our kind
And call the world our own—
Sara, you crossed that line
And led me home.

We have words for those we cherish,
And names for those we don’t:
Pet and pest and food and wild,
The ones we love and won’t.
We put creation into cages,
Rank each life from high to low,
But you never asked to be like me
For me to love you so.

What if the walls between us
Were never nature’s walls?
What if love was here before
We named ourselves at all?

Sara, you opened up my soul,
Showed me love I’d never known.
There are doors inside the human heart
We don’t know we’ve closed.
We draw a line around our kind
And call the world our own—
Sara, you crossed that line
And led me home.

And when your little life was ending,
I kept you warm and dry.
My tears fell down upon your fur,
There was nothing left to hide.
And somewhere deeper than our language,
Deeper than the names we knew,
I heard: *Thank you for loving me.*
And all I had was: *Thank you too.*

You weren’t less because you weren’t human.
I wasn’t more because I was.
For one moment there were no species—
There was only love.

Sara, you opened up my soul,
And the whole wide world came through.
Every creature I’d looked past
Became somebody too.
The ones we fear, the ones we cage,
The ones we never know—
Sara, you broke the oldest boundary
I’d carried in my soul.

I thought I took you from the lilies
Because you needed setting free.
But Sara, all these years later,
I finally see:

I thought that I was saving you.

You were setting me free.

And maybe love was never ours,
Never human, never small.
Maybe love belongs to no one.

Maybe love belongs to all.