Category: Connection & Healing

Poems on stepping across self-imposed borders—examining the quiet strength it takes to care, mend fractures, and witness others.

Connection & Healing, Portraits & Human Connection

Just Not Tonight

courtneybosworth

There she sits, a country entirely on her own.

A voice inside whispers: Go ask for her phone.

But the old walls rise up,

heavy and tight—

No, I can’t do it. Just not tonight.

She is too sweet for the scars that I wear,

Too bright for the shadow I bring to the chair.

She must be waiting for someone, I think—

So back to the borders I quietly shrink.

I turn from the table, I step from the floor,

Leaving tomorrow to guard the front door.

But days turn to months, and the months into years,

Until loneliness hardens and swallows the fears.

And the old ceiling questions circle the dark:

How does a stone ever find a bright spark?

For I cannot see through the ghost of my history, Why anyone like her would want someone like me?

Connection & Healing, Silence & Solitude

My Best Friend

courtneybosworth

“You talk to yourself to hear yourself speak,”

My mother would say, her patience worn thin.

The youngest of three, a ghost in the hall,

Watching the shadows of evening close in.

Solitary hours before dinner was made,

A boy creating a world on the floor.

Now the habit remains like an old wooden latch

Keeping the winter away from the door.

For silence is fertile, a wild, empty space

Where the ghosts of old history are easily made.

I anchor my mind when the perimeters fade,

To keep the long loneliness outside the gate.

Let the world call it strange to converse with the air;

It is only the masonry guarding the deep.

When the room grows too heavy,

I break through the dark—

I talk to myself To hear myself speak.

Connection & Healing, The Natural World

The Terror Twins

courtneybosworth

Loneliness had settled deep into the floorboards.

For eight long years, I was my mother’s anchor to the world—

The pugs kept watch by daylight, and I took over the night.

When she passed, the dogs and I carried the quiet together,

Until time claimed them too, and left me alone in the frame.

Two silent years passed. The quiet in the rooms began to sink in.

“Get another pet,” everyone advised. “Get a cat.”

“No,” I declared, adamant. “I am simply not a cat person.”

And then came Lily and Misty—the Terror Twins.

Lily, the exotic tiger, wrapped in sharp gray and black stripes;

Misty, the quiet aristocrat, draped in soft, seamless ash.

Separately, they are the gentlest creatures in the whole wide world.

Together, the peace is shattered, and the Terror takes the floor.

They bounce off the upholstery like stray cannonballs,

Scaling the drapes and turning the hallway into a speedway.

They launch themselves down the staircase in a flurry of fur,

Ensuring the house is never, ever quiet—

Especially at midnight, when the real mischief begins.

The heavy silence has finally fled the house,

Replaced by two wild, gray heartbeats.

The “Terror” remains, And my world is infinitely better for it.

Connection & Healing, Memory & Roots, Silence & Solitude

My Birthday

courtneybosworth

My birth arrived on a day I cannot recall,

But they tell me the solstice sun covered it all.

The longest of days, bathed in a summer glare,

A Father’s Day Sunday, heavy in the air.

Now, I find the calendar plays a cruel joke,

Preferring the quiet where the midnight spoke.

The extra hours of daylight offer me no grace,

Just a burning sun that I cannot embrace.

I seek the deep shadows where the timber stands tall,

Where the judging rays of the summer never fall.

I avoid the bright beaches and the glaring heat,

Finding my sanctuary in a shaded retreat.

But the years turn around, and the mocking returns,

A fatherless child while the solstice sun burns.

When the calendar aligns in its brightest display, The world only highlights what was taken away.

Connection & Healing, Silence & Solitude

The Geography of Silence

courtneybosworth

I began where the world was small and green,

counting the heartbeats of quiet beasts,

the air thick with a lucky, unburdened light.

I was a creature of the open yard,

mischief moving through the high grass

before the maps were drawn,

before the long winter arrived.

Then the horizon broke at the yard’s edge—

a sudden iron weight, a sharp theft of breath.

The right side of the world went dark,

the body redrawn in heavy, stubborn lines,

and the boy who ran was left behind.

The air turned thick and unfamiliar,

and the doors of the loud world slammed shut.

I became the stranger in a foreign climate,

carrying a quiet no one knew how to speak to.

For decades, I have lived along the perimeter,

a solitary drop watching the ocean move in pairs.

I left the crowded tables to the daylight people,

withdrawing into the cool sanctuary of the mind.

Stone by stone, in the silence of great halls,

I forged a kingdom out of ink and thought,

moving across changing hills,

standing before rows of empty eyes to pass down the flame,

yet always returning to the house with one chair.

I can navigate the vast, invisible stars of the intellect,

but I am lost in the simple country of a hand held out.

At 3:00 AM, the old questions still circle the ceiling:

How do you cross the distance between two rooms? What is the word that makes a stranger stay?

The solitude is a heavy coat I never chose to wear,

yet I wear it like armor now.

I am a builder of quiet history, waiting on the border,

hoping an eye will look past the heavy frame,

and love the hidden, wild music of a heart still ready to be known.