Category: Uncategorized

My past remains behind me; it holds no final claim,

I chart the open water, the master of my fate.

Yet kindness is the compass that guides my quiet heart—

I have no room for venom, no need or use to hate.

I write the living chapter with steady hand and pen,

Though other ships will cross me and winds may try their will;

I do not drift in silence, a passive passenger,

Nor let a passing shadow command the course I fill.

With loving care I anchor, with stoic mind I steer,

Unbowed by heavy weather, unmoved by what was said.

No struggle in this journey shall ever keep me down;

I will be quiet when I’m dead.

I step off the gravel path, leaving the daylight noise behind,

Slipping into a cathedral built of bark and quiet mind.

Here, the shadows do not crowd; they do not question or evaluate,

The heavy canopy just rests, an ancient, unblinking gate.

And then she stands before me, weathered, magnificent, and high,

A single monument of timber reaching out to claim the sky.

She does not ask for titles, nor the metrics of the day,

She only beckons with her branches, clearing winter walls away.

To stand beneath her quiet weight is to drop my heavy coat,

To find a sanctuary waiting in a world that time forgot.

No need to prove a history, no need to guard the floor,

Just a solitary traveler welcomed at the forest door.

They flutter through the canopy with care,

To gather moss and twigs from branch and ground;

Then lift their fragile treasures through the air,

Where patient hands and quiet skill are found.

These expert craftsmen shape a home from scratch,

And weave the scattered forest into form;

A cradle where the hidden brood may hatch,

Secured against the bitter wind and storm.

Yet safe within the sanctuary’s bound,

The growing wings prepare to take the sky;

Until at last, above the empty ground,

The fledglings leave the woven boughs and fly.

The cycle turns as seasons disappear:

A house rebuilt with patient love each year.

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.

Raindrops keep falling on my head—

that was the song I chose

to perform at the school recital.

But I froze.

I was five or six

and all the parents were there,

looking for their child to perform.

But I didn’t care about them.

I was going to be the star of the show.

They were going to see.

Everyone’s eyes

were going to be looking at me.

I practiced every day.

And every night.

I was going to be the star.

But I froze from the fear.

I froze from the fright.

I ran from the stage—

all the eyes looking at me.

I was going to be the star, but it wasn’t to be.