They arrive in the quietest boxes,
small breaths held against the dark,
wild eyes counting the shadows of a world
that has not been kind.
To reach a hand into the cage
is to look into a mirror of fractured light—
here is the trembling, the hidden music,
the fierce, silent defense of the small.
In learning the language of their fear,
the heavy coat of the perimeter begins to slip.
We tend to the forgotten, the bottle-fed infants,
the ones who only know how to hide.
And in the side-by-side labor of the healing,
an ancient blueprint shifts.
For to worry over a heartbeat that is not your own,
to let your thoughts anchor in another’s survival,
is to step out of the house with one chair.
The world calls it a soft thing, a fragile habit,
to bend your back for the broken and the small.
But there is a fierce iron in the vulnerability,
a structural majesty in choosing to ache
for a life that cannot offer you a resume or a name.
It is not weakness to stand uncovered before their need;
it is the heavy masonry of the soul,
the quiet architecture of a heart that refuses to close.
We scooped inside the boxes to save the discarded,
only to find the walls of our own winter melting.
They do not ask for the vast stars of the intellect;
they ask only for the steady certainty of now.
And in the touch of a small, mended creature,
the rescuer is redrawn.
Held in the curve of an unburdened hour,
the soul remembers how to be found.
Courtney Bosworth's Blog 