Sorry

Silence Be

0501.2025

Take my silence as a gift.

Let its span bring your life lividity.

Let my prescience be enough—

the epistles of my dumb heart,

written in the ache and dust

of its lessons,

holy to your life.

Because for now, my one life—

its courage has become

a little white bird—

bone-light, wing-worn—

and she is being eaten mid-flight

by a darkness falling too fast

for anything, even dying,

to escape it.

O, the night and I know how this ends.

The dark is not always a blanket, but a hunter.

Its arrow does not miss.

Its kiss will last all eternity.

The ending does not ask.

It arrives.

Pierces.

Refuses to apologize.

And through its silence—and still—

through the quickening

of my dwindling constitution,

I soar,

one breaststroke at a time,

through a sky

that has already laid claim to me.

And this is how it ends:

with a kind of kiss—

where I invite the groom of ruin

to press his mouth to mine

and close the chapter,

lowering my body into the ground

like a reward for enduring,

a breath held too long.

I’m glad.

Relieved.

Let the conclusion quiet

what I once dared to sing.

I remember when I was

loud and bright and burning—

when I sang like a dove

mourning her own broken face in the sky,

like I believed I could call the dead

back into their skins.

And maybe I did.

Who can say?

But now—

The silence is a morgue’s sheet,

soaked in its desire for my body.

The longing is so perverse

it has gone mute.

Even the stars have turned their faces.

And I am tired

of meaning things.

So end me.

Or change the sky.

But do not ask me

to sing again

without something holy

in my throat.

m.c.f.