You are not what they told me you’d be.
The name they gave you
fits like a funeral around a sunshower,
a feeble attempt at containment.
Widow is a word with stooped shoulders,
a conch shell spine,
a grey husk of waiting.
.
You are a million moments of sunlit water
reborn as comets.
Your limbs are rivers.
You grow colors in the backyard
and spill them like secrets in conversation
with stories of a man so bright
I feel his sun on my face.
.
There is no word for what you are,
and certainly not one that is born from death.
I want to cry when you dance at my shows,
as if I am singing cherry blossoms awake.
.
When you called me
“one of the beautiful reasons I was left behind”
– only then, I saw a shadow,
a brief glimpse into the canyon
those years carved in you,
savage and slow,
A memory of smallness tucked inside.
.
I wonder
at how gently it holds me.
