Get Your Footprints Out Of My Garden: A Poetry Collection

By K.J. Moss

This collection of fifty poems by K.J. Moss is a reflection of her healing journey from a traumatized young girl to a courageous, inspiring woman. 

She Climbed a Mountain 

That girl you knew.

She no longer exists. 

That version of me. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wood Dragon books
• Release date: Jan 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9781990863516

Book preview

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Trauma

Just Like That

Hey You!

Dear 12-Year-Old Self

I See You

I Found You

Hook Into My Heart

Healing

It’s Saving My Life

Man, I’m Trying To Get Myself There

Eventually

Growth

Stillness

Listening

Moving On

Centre

We All Have Ghosts In Our Closets

Opportunity

Peace

Why Am I Like This

Push Away

I Had No Idea

Sadness

What Do I Feel

Sickening

Breadcrumbs

Shut The Door

Messy

You Met Me

I Didn’t See You

I’m Sorry

Goodbye Forever

Feel It

If I Sit

I Wanted

Living

A Whisper In The Meadow

I Talk to You

Love

I Liked It When You Loved Me

Yours

If I Could See The Future

Tethers

When We Say Goodbye

Footprints In My Garden

What Does Your Soul Say

Lay With Me

Fearless

Who am I

I Stumble

They Built A Road

As I Dance

Puddle

Conclusion

About The Poems

Acknowledgements

About The Poet

Introduction

By letting go

it all gets done.

The world is won

by those who let it go.

But when you try and try,

the world is beyond the winning.

Lao Tzu

During a session with my psychologist, I filled out a five-part self-care assessment which measured self-care in the areas of physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and professional life. We discovered that I had no spiritual self-care. The why of this burst me into tears. I realized my aversion to organized religion was the result of a well-meaning group of people who had tried to pray the trauma out of me—the trauma acquired from a grade-seven school trip, where I was trapped in an elevator with a predator. The humiliation of these individuals knowing what had happened to me, and being only 12 years old at the time, all added to the PTSD—and religion became a trauma trigger.

About two years into my therapy sessions, these poems started flying out of my soul. Trapping them in the notes app on my phone, I shared them with my psychologist, and the complexity of this injury started to reveal itself layer by layer.

Many closed trauma doors flung wide open. This awakening and purging of my soul resulted in an emergency session with my psychologist where I was diagnosed with c-PTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Complex because the original trauma was followed by several smaller traumas related to that first one.

The weeks following this abrupt awaking resulted in the soul spilling of these poems. On a lazy Sunday, I wrote the first nine poems. Nine, in one day. Almost every hour on the hour a new poem came. Oddly, when I went back to look at the poems that I had written, I was shocked to discover that I didn’t remember writing some of them. With one particular poem, my brain was actually told to step aside by my soul—so that the words could flow out with no