Life Will Break You - by Louise Erdich

Life will break you.
Nobody can protect you from that,
and living alone won’t
either
for solitude will also break you
with its yearning.

You have to love.
You have to feel.

It is the reason you are here on earth.

You are here to risk your heart.
You are here to be swallowed up.

And when it happens
that you are broken
or betrayed
or left
or hurt
or death brushes near

Let yourself sit
by an apple tree and
listen
to the apples
falling all around you in heaps

wasting their sweetness.

Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.