The Heavens Make Room
There is a place I return to
when the world fills with too many voices.
A salt marsh,
wide and unhurried,
where the grasses move like breath
and the sky opens
until it feels large enough
to hold whatever a heart cannot.
I climb the wooden tower there
and look out across the preserve
toward the bridge
and the far horizon.
Sometimes,
if the hour is right,
the sun and the moon
share the same heaven,
their light touching quietly
in the high blue air
The golden glow of a kiss.
There was a season
the world was a storm.
Wind through the marsh.
Rain crossing the water
in gray sheets.
The grasses bent low
and the sky stayed closed.
Then the storm begins to loosen.
The rain thins.
The air turns cool and clean.
A wind moves through the reeds
carrying the green smell of earth.
And the light breaks through
the opening sky.
Warmth moves through the grasses
until the field remembers
what it was made to grow.
The bright meadow
opening itself
to the sun.
And suddenly the sky
begins writing.
Hearts in the clouds.
Small confessions
written in the sky,
in the negative spaces
between the leaves,
in the wandering shapes
of mangrove branches.
Because something in me
had finally learned to see.
A song that lives in my body
moves through me
a honeybee
lands
on my hand.
Usually
this is the moment
where fear arrives first.
My heart startles.
But I do not move.
My breath stops halfway in my chest,
my heart pounding
the way it does
when you let something in
that could also leave.
hello, little bee.
The small golden body
rests there
as if my hand were simply
another place
the bright meadow
has made
for sweetness.
For a moment
the beating of its wings
and the music in my chest
are the same rhythm.
Then it lifts,
a soft departure
into the bright air,
and I blow it a kiss
as it disappears
into the tall grass.
The marsh breathes softly
beneath a widening sky.
Wind moves through reeds.
Water holds light.
Above the water
the sky is doing that quiet miracle
it sometimes does.
holding both lights
without asking either to leave.
And I think about how strange
and beautiful it is
that the heavens
have never needed to choose.
They simply make room.
I have watched the sun
and the moon
step in time
in the same sky.
