Words by Amy Michelle
Poetry • Nature • Reflection
My Writing
Welcome to My Writing — a quiet space where poetry, reflections, and stories find their way into the world.
Come take a walk with me.
Here, you'll find a selection of my work—poems, prose, and creative projects that explore grief, hope, healing, faith, resilience, and the beauty woven through the natural world.
Some pieces have found homes in publications and collections. Others are still growing, still finding their place.
Each one reflects a different season of my journey and the ways language helps me make sense of what I carry, what I cherish, and what I continue to learn.
This is a living space, always evolving as my writing evolves. I hope you'll visit often.
Featured Project
A Rooted Sanctuary
A digital poetry and photography zine by
Amy Michelle Kennedy
Featuring six original poems paired with original nature photography, A Rooted Sanctuary explores belonging, renewal, wonder, resilience, and the healing found in the natural world.
Created over many years of wandering woodland trails, listening to streams, watching sunsets, and finding beauty in quiet places, this collection invites readers to slow down, reflect, and reconnect with the natural world.
📖 Read Online
https://online.fliphtml5.com/lbxty/A-Rooted-Sanctuary/#p=1
⬇️ Download the PDF
https://ko-fi.com/s/d9db7827e8
Explore My Writing
Selected Poems
These poems have been carefully chosen from different seasons of my writing journey. Some are drawn from published collections, while others come from quieter corners of my work.
This selection will change from time to time, so I hope you'll visit again and discover something new.
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Reflections
Not every thought arrives as a poem.
Some stories ask for a different shape.
Reflections is a place for personal essays, letters, prose pieces, and moments of contemplation. Here I write about the things that stay with me—grief and healing, beauty and belonging, faith and uncertainty, and the everyday moments that quietly leave their mark.
These pieces may wander from deep waters to simple joys, but each one begins with paying attention.
I Wish Heaven Had a Telephone
June 21, 2026
I wish Heaven had a telephone. Not because I have unanswered questions or because I need some great mystery explained. I simply miss my dad.
I miss hearing his voice. I miss knowing that no matter what was happening in my life, I could pick up the phone and hear him say my name. Ever since I was little, I looked up to him—literally and figuratively. He was my hero, and in my eyes, he was larger than life, a strong and steady anchor that I believed could never break.
He was the kind of person who could make an entire room laugh. My dad was a comedian at heart, always cracking jokes and saying things that made people blush. He had the most beautiful blue eyes, and when he smiled, they crinkled just slightly at the corners. People were naturally drawn to him. He carried a warmth that made strangers feel like friends.
Growing up, Dad taught me countless things. Some lessons came through words; others came through example. He always told me to give everything one hundred percent and that if I could honestly say I had done my best, he would always be proud of me.
These words have stayed with me throughout my life. Even now, I hear them when I am facing something difficult.
When my mom died, I was seventeen years old. Our world shattered overnight. Watching my dad navigate that loss was one of the hardest things I have ever witnessed. After twenty-three years of marriage and twenty-six years together, he had lost his best friend.
The grief nearly broke him.
Yet somehow he kept going. He poured everything he had into my sisters and me. He showed up for us, even when he was hurting himself.
As I've gotten older, I've come to understand my father in ways I couldn't when I was young. Most people knew him as the life of the party, the funny guy who could make everyone laugh. But what many people didn't see was the sadness he carried beneath the surface.
I saw it in the quiet moments when he thought no one was watching. I saw the tears he quickly brushed away. I saw the weight he tried so hard to hide.
My father believed he had to be strong all the time. And in many ways, I've inherited that belief from him.
My dad could be a contradiction at times. He had a heart as vast as the ocean and was one of the most generous people I have ever known. He could be the loudest person in the room and yet carry the deepest loneliness. He made people laugh while carrying pain that few truly understood.
It has taken me years to realize that strength and sorrow were living side by side within him all along.
Today is the second Father's Day since his death.
The first one passed in a blur of numbness, and I don't remember much about it. But this year is different. This year, I feel everything—the ache, the love, the gratitude, the sadness.
And as overwhelming as it can sometimes be, I am grateful that I feel it
.
Grief is painful, but it is also evidence of love. And I loved my dad deeply.
What I miss most is not any single conversation or memory. What I miss is the feeling that as long as my dad was here, everything would somehow be okay. He had a gentle spirit that made the world feel a little less frightening.
He was my safe place, my protector, my hero.
I am no longer angry. I forgive him. In many ways, I even understand. But understanding does not erase the loneliness. It does not stop me from wishing I could hear his laugh one more time or see those blue eyes crinkle when he smiled.
So today, on Father's Day especially, I find myself wishing heaven had a telephone.
I would call just to tell him about my life. I would tell him about the books, the poetry, and the people who have been touched by my words. I would tell him that every day I still try my best, just as he taught me.
Most of all, I would tell him that I love him.
And before hanging up, before the line goes quiet, I would make sure he heard those words one more time.
I love you, Dad.
I always will.
Please enjoy this recording of
I Wish Heaven had a Telephone.
Where the Morning Found Me
June 23, 2026
A few mornings ago, I stepped onto my porch just as the first light stretched across the horizon. I wasn’t expecting anything remarkable — just another quiet beginning, another day waiting to unfold. But the moment I looked up, something inside me shifted.
The sky was astonishing.
It felt as if God had paused His brush mid-stroke, leaving behind a masterpiece no memory could fully hold. Above me, the heavens glowed in a palette that felt almost impossible: amethyst melting into sapphire, and sapphire igniting into tangerine. The colors didn’t simply appear — they breathed, deep and alive, as if the sky itself were waking with intention.
Then, I noticed everything else.
The birds were already singing — not loudly, but earnestly, their songs weaving through the cool morning like thin strands of hope. A soft wind stirred the trees, and the leaves responded in gentle applause, their rustling a kind of whispered blessing. Even the air felt new, brushed clean by night and scented with earth and possibility.
I stood there barefoot on the porch, still and small, wrapped in a moment that felt both fragile and infinite.
And in that stillness, gratitude rose in me — quietly, but completely.
For a few sacred seconds, the weight I’ve been carrying loosened its hold.
The noise inside me softened.
The ache I rarely name fell quiet.
All that remained was light — simple, generous, unearned light.
That sunrise reminded me that joy doesn’t always shout; sometimes it arrives on tiptoe. Sometimes it glows softly. Sometimes it waits on your porch to see if you’ll notice.
And maybe that’s what I’m most grateful for:
that even in seasons when I feel cracked at the edges or unsure of my footing, the world still offers beauty big enough to steady me.
That the sky has room for me.
That God still paints in colors meant to pull me back into myself.
That the morning doesn’t ask who I am before it decides to rise.
I’m grateful for where the morning found me —
standing in wonder, wrapped in color, reminded that being alive can still take my breath away.
Grateful for the amethyst sky, the sapphire light, the tangerine glow.
Grateful for the wind, the birds, the trees.
Grateful that life still surprises me with tenderness.
Just grateful — deeply, unexpectedly, soulfully grateful.
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The Gift and the Wound
June 26, 2026
Adoption is woven into every chapter of my life. It is impossible to separate who I am from the story of how I arrived here. For many years, I thought of adoption as a single event in my childhood—a moment when I was six years old. As I have grown older, however, I have come to understand that adoption is not a moment. It is a lifelong journey that continues to shape the way I see myself, my family, and the world around me.
My story began long before I was adopted. The first years of my life were marked by instability, fear, and circumstances no child should ever have to endure. Those early experiences left wounds that did not simply disappear when my circumstances changed. Adoption did not erase my past, nor did it magically heal every hurt. What it did provide was something I desperately needed: safety, stability, and the opportunity to begin again.
When I was adopted, my family welcomed a little girl who already carried a lifetime of experiences in her small heart. I was not a blank slate. I came with fears, questions, losses, and memories I did not yet know how to understand. Looking back now, I realize how remarkable that was. My adoptive family stepped into a story that was already in progress, and they chose to love me anyway. Their love became one of the greatest gifts of my life.
As I have grown older, I have learned that adoption holds both gratitude and grief. For a long time, I believed I had to choose between those emotions, as though acknowledging one somehow diminished the other. Experience has taught me otherwise. I can be profoundly grateful for my adoptive family while still mourning the losses that came before them. I can celebrate the life I was given while honoring the pain that shaped its beginnings. Those realities do not compete with one another. They simply coexist.
Adoption has influenced the way I move through the world in ways I am still discovering. It taught me the value of belonging because I know what it feels like to search for it. It deepened my empathy for those who feel unseen, displaced, or misunderstood. It taught me that healing is not a destination we arrive at but a journey we continue throughout our lives. Most of all, it taught me that love is often a choice, expressed through presence, commitment, patience, and care.
I often think adoption helped shape the writer I have become. Writing has given me a place to explore the questions, memories, and emotions that accompany my story. Through poetry and reflection, I have learned to hold every part of my journey with compassion. The difficult chapters matter just as much as the beautiful ones because together they tell the story of how I became who I am.
Today, when I reflect on adoption, I no longer see it as a single event from my childhood. I see it as a thread woven throughout my entire life. That thread carries both loss and love, grief and gratitude, brokenness and healing. It reminds me that our beginnings influence us, but they do not determine our future. We are shaped not only by what happens to us, but by how we choose to grow through it.
Adoption is part of my story, but it is not the whole story. It is one of many threads woven together to form the person I am today—a woman who has known hardship and healing, loss and love, uncertainty and hope.
The gift was never the absence of pain.
The gift was finding people who helped me carry it.
Perhaps that is what adoption has taught me most: love does not erase the wound. It walks beside it, patiently and faithfully, until one day you realize the gift and the wound have become part of the same story.
