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.