Fading Grace

How strange to wake and find the world still here,

the morning patient as it always was,

with mist dissolving gently from the hills

and somewhere far, a river finding the sea.

──⊱❉⊰ ──

The oak grows bold without a second thought,

the winter wren sings fiercely in the cold,

and all that lives submits to its own season,

unhurried, unashamed, and strangely whole.

──⊱❉⊰ ──

An old man seats himself beneath an elm,

the afternoon spread wide across his lap,

and in his stillness something quietly settles,

the way a bird lands certain of its branch.

──⊱❉⊰ ──

We carry what we cannot put to language,

the weight of skies we witnessed years ago,

the faces of those who left without a warning,

still held closely when the long day ends.

──⊱❉⊰ ──

And yet the light returns without our bidding,

falls equally on dust and open bloom,

as if the world holds no accounting ledger,

just this, and this, and this, and then this too.

──⊱❉⊰ ──

So walk the length of what your life has given,

its narrow paths, its unexpected wide,

for grace was never waiting at the summit,

but threaded quietly through every mile.

──⊱❉⊰ ──

We are the brief and tender hours of something

too vast and calm for words or for the keeping,

yet while we last, we shimmer in the asking,

alive, bewildered, open, and still seeking.