A Note:
Neither hope nor despair.
Only the stance of remaining,
bare in the wind.
To Love The Branchless Branch
I did not make this world,
but I gave my children to it,
hands trembling,
heart wide as the sky.
The air of my own lifetime
was not perfect,
but it was enough
to let me grow into myself.
Now I look forward
and see the stormline advancing,
its shadow crawling toward them.
I do not want them to suffer.
Not my children.
Not the children they may have,
who will inherit
a world more brittle,
more splintered,
more desperate for light.
I feel this grief like weather in my bones.
It is not mine alone.
It is older than me,
rooted in every parent
who ever saw the path ahead
growing darker
and could not lift the darkness away.
If I could,
I would be the branchless branch,
the bare, worn branch,
stripped but unbroken,
bending the storm around them.
I would trade my years for theirs.
I would let them keep
the small, soft mornings
I still remember,
where life felt endless,
and the horizon stayed kind.
But I have only this —
to love them so fiercely
that they remember
they are not alone,
even when the world
forgets its gentler face.
Yet when I step back,
I feel the truth ripple through me —
this life was never meant to be held.
It moves like wind,
like water,
like the breath of a sleeping child.
I see my children,
and I see every child —
not as anchors to a fixed world,
but as sparks,
brief, unrepeatable,
enough to light the sky for a moment.
Perhaps this is all beauty ever was —
the shimmer before it fades,
the note that lingers,
not in its staying,
but in how it disappears.
If I can rest here,
I can love without clenching,
weep without drowning,
and trust that even in a future
I will never see,
somewhere, someone
will feel the echo
of how fiercely I loved them.
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