Hold a requiem
For the many things you will become
in an attempt to heal
Sometimes you will fall into the habit of digging— an archaeologist excavating the remains of each memory tracing the fractures of man-made wounds
Your fingers will bleed from pulling out a root, wedged too deep, the gardener in you knows nothing will ever bloom here again.
The ache in your wrist from swinging the gavel, passing judgment on everything you didn't say, see or stop.
Parts of you will try to map a way back to before— drawing lines across the terrain of uncharted grief, but the cartographer too will be lost and returned to the present
Steady trembling hands with a scalpel poised above what festers, where it aches the most, and when the sutures fail to hold, the surgeon might become an alchemist to find use for this pain
but the poet will always press ear to the chest of your wounds,
listen for the cadence of healing, if only for a moment.
Somewhere in all of this, there’s an architect aching to build again
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