Category: Sovereign Preservation

Connection & Healing, Memory & Roots, Sovereign Preservation

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, Memory & Roots, Silence & Solitude, Sovereign Preservation

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, Silence & Solitude, Sovereign Preservation

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?