Member-only story
POETRY
Mourning
Tears of the lifeless
I struck down a woman I knew,
and grieved her till heaven collided with the material world,
till angels forgot the language of mercy
and the stars looked away from what I had done.
There were nebulae in her irises,
whole galaxies trembling beneath her gaze,
as she watched her own life
diminish into a speck of dust.
Her tears held the last vestiges of life,
each one a dying constellation,
each one a prayer that had forgotten its God.
They traced the contours of her face
like rain upon a half-sculpted stone,
and melancholy took form in her silence,
glistening where her laughter once lived.
I had made a monument of her suffering,
and called it beautiful.
I stoned her with the fragments of my tenderness,
with every unspoken word, every abandoned dream,
until even her shadows recoiled from her body.
She stood like nature’s last restraint
before the wilderness swallowed the world,
a final, fragile mercy
at the edge of something irretrievable.
And she lost everything.
the light that once gathered at her feet,
the spring that bloomed beneath her ribs,
the thousand little futures
she had folded like letters
and hidden beneath her tongue.
Oh, why?
Why did I do this to her?
Why did the hands that once held her
Become the very things she feared?
