No Season to Stay

......................................

In the ashen hush of dawn,

where smoke supplants the mist,

I stand-rooted in a silence

no longer innocent.

/

I ask myself-

what, in this fractured earth,

still belongs to me?

/

Are these roots an inheritance,

or a quiet sentence

I was never meant to escape?

/

Seasons once arrived as gentle confessions-

now they stagger through ruin,

indistinguishable from grief.

Did they ever intend to remain,

or was I the one

who believed in their return?

/

I have bloomed beneath borrowed skies,

unaware they would one day burn.

Was that light ever mine,

or merely a fleeting mercy

before the fire?

/

The wind no longer carries whispers-

only the residue of endings.

If it scatters what I am,

what, then, is left of me?

/

Rain falls, but not to cleanse-

it mingles with dust and memory.

If it can blur even the ground I stand on,

was this place ever certain?

/

When distance grows between lives,

is it loss-

or the only language survival understands?

/

They come, they leave, they return-

footsteps heavy with echoes.

But I ask-

what meaning does return hold

when nothing remains as it was?

/

I have witnessed departures

that felt like mercy,

and returns

that carried no redemption.

/

So I no longer reach

beyond the soil that holds me.

I remain-

not untouched,

but unclaimed

by the transient violence of passing things.

/

I do not bloom for the eyes that once gathered here,

nor for the memory of gentler days.

If I bloom,

it is in defiance-

a quiet insistence of being

amid erasure.

/

And in this scarred stillness,

I summon no season to stay-

for even time has learned

to move on without asking.