Accepting the burden of work, I was gifted riddles
and room to relocate the stars, a new home founded.
My trembling reflected in his mask, frost spreading
at his every word. Defiant, determined, I said: you.
I sang to myself in eleven voices, of eleven songs;
I sing the saddest still with joy in my heavy heart.
A flutter of wings marked the arrival of more work,
distracted when I walked away. She never asked why.
Her fury ran red as her dress, rage enough to kill
them all; we stayed her axe, and I found a calling.
The moon chose the one who chose him: silver smile,
black feathers, red blood & the lightest of chains.
Morning light barely made it past the curtains, not
like back home, waking in gold to a song I let end.
It means opposite of hope, yet hope is all we heard
in every inked name, every sworn oath: a beginning.
It was not about where the cards fell: the deal had
already been struck, the details decided by chance.
I hadn't realized I'd been watching that same smile
rise and recede for years until I asked to keep it.
He does not understand stillness, shadow caught in
candlelight, but I followed every word & accepted.
Emptiness cannot be filled with sunlight and wine,
but they can carve a new path away from that ache.
Silent stretches do not keep the dust from dancing
in the light--nor dry up all the ink in the world.