Even the Heart Survives by Caesura

When you were born, you cried—

dragged from your small blue harbor

into a world of bright knives

and winter voices.

And I let the tears flow

like salty rivers of the first spring,

washing the crimson shores of

your newborn cheeks.

The tide was already pulling you.

I felt the call, too—

the old lunar ache,

freezing in the marrow.

But I had you.

So I wrapped myself around your smallness.

I kept the dark pulse lantern lit.

I taught your lungs the discipline of returning.

Pause —

release —

return.

Even the heart survives by caesura.

When you were five and split your knee

open on the gravel,

you cried into your mother's coat

while rain gathered in the gutters.

I stitched our skin back together.

When you were sixteen

and loved boys who loved disappearing,

you cried again—

and I carried you through

the brine-dark grief,

held you close while you

thought you were abandoned by the gods.

I carried you through winters

that settled in your mouth

like black ice.

Through mornings when your bones

ached with the terrible burden

of continuing.

Through the nights you stood at the shoreline

too long,

listening to the sea name every possibility.

I feel how tired you have become.

I read it in the slowing of your hands,

in the way you leave tea going cold

beside the bed,

in the way your words grew an ash-like hue,

as though you are already learning

to haunt yourself.

Life began with rupture,

but even devastation obeys cycles.

The burned forest blackens—

then greens.

The tide recedes—

then returns carrying silver fish

and pieces of lost glass softened by the sea.

Somewhere, beneath the ice

the river already prepares for spring.

I have carried you this far

through every winter you tried to vanish from,

I have wrapped my ribs around you

like a nest of wet branches.

Let me keep you one more morning.

One more apricity

spilling gold across the floorboards.

One more psithurism

as I take you through the fallen

amber leaves on the path

of all we tried to keep.

Look—

another morning

gathering softly at the windows,

and me still cradling you

in the warm hollow of my being.