I was here
My poem today is not delicate. It does not whisper. It does not philosophise itself into abstraction. It repeats. It plants its feet. It says, ‘I lived’ the way you knock on a door when no one is answering, and you are absolutely certain you are not leaving.
I have been thinking about endurance, the unglamorous kind. Not the curated resilience with a soft filter and a quote underneath. The kind where you stay. Under weight. Under pressure. Where loving feels less like a sonnet and more like weather: persistent, slightly unhinged, impossible to reason with.
We like to imagine our lives as light and fleeting. But this poem suspects otherwise. It suspects that the ground remembers us. That time, eventually, learns the shape of our insistence.
It is, in its own stubborn way, a record.
A small, steady declaration: I was here. Please adjust the cosmos accordingly.
I was here.
I lived,
I lived,
I lived,
under weight.
A scar
in the surface of the world,
salt dragged through it,
tears wearing grooves
where nothing was meant to last.
I loved,
I loved,
I loved,
with a grip like weather,
with a will that would not loosen.
My feet held fast,
pressed into the grammar of soil,
the earth memorising
my insistence.
I waited,
I waited,
I waited,
the pressure gathered,
where minutes stacked and hardened.
And, I did not look away
until time learned my name.Love,
The poem feels like someone refusing to let their own life fade into the background, insisting gently but firmly that their presence mattered. It captures a kind of endurance that isn’t glamorous the kind that comes from staying, from holding on, from loving even when it hurts. The repetition of I lived and I loved feels like a heartbeat, a reminder that simply existing through difficulty is its own kind of victory. The imagery of scars, salt, soil, and pressure makes the experience feel physical, as if the world itself carries the marks of that persistence. Love here isn’t soft or tidy; it’s stubborn, weather‑like, something that refuses to loosen its grip. What makes the poem so human is the quiet insistence that time eventually notices those who refuse to look away. It reads like a declaration carved into the world: I stayed, I felt, I mattered and the universe should shift to make room for that truth.
Layer upon layer
Compressed
Earth bound.