Lush

Poems written to prompts by Laura Catanzano

Lush

Tonight,

I lay myself down

in something verdant

not a bed,

but a yielding;

a lush unravelling

into the quiet intelligence of leaves,

as though the earth had

drawn back its ribs

to cradle me in green.

Like Titania in her twilight bower,

I am gathered

by petals and shadow,

by the slow breath

of roots beneath me,

by the soft insistence

of life continuing

without my permission.

The day loosens;

its sharp grammar

dissolving into moss,

its noise gentled into

something almost kind.

I have carried enough of it;

the restless arithmetic of thought,

the small, unnameable

griefs that gather in the body.

Tonight,

I ask for no clarity,

only release.

Let sleep come lush and low,

a dark abundance,

a quiet flooding of the self.

Let me drink

from that ancient forgetting;

the deep, mythic

draught of nepenthe;

not to erase,

but to soften the edges of being.

I pray for dreams

that hold me gently.

For a mind unspooled

from its own vigilance.

For the tender anonymity of rest.

And if the night gathers me closer,

let it be with a hush like velvet,

a stillness that feels like mercy,

a darkness that does not demand,

only receives.

Lush,

let me be undone into sleep.

---

Bright

Winter stayed too long;

a stubborn guest

with iron in its breath,

pressing its cold thumbprint

into every hour.

From the window,

the skies were a bruise;

dark,

unyielding;

the world pared back

to bone, to absence,

to the quiet mathematics of survival.

I receded;

not dramatically,

not all at once,

but the way frost claims a field:

slow,

invisible,

inevitable.

Drawing inward,

folding myself into smaller

and smaller silences,

until even my thoughts felt distant,

like footsteps in another room.

There was a kind of safety in it;

this narrowing,

this numbness;

a wintering of the soul

that asked nothing but endurance.

But time,

in its quiet rebellion,

turned.

And one morning;

not with fanfare,

not with certainty.

I looked again to the window.

The sky had shifted.

Not fully,

not boldly;

but enough.

A thin seam of brightness

stitched itself along the horizon,

fragile as breath,

insistent as memory.

And something in me;

long buried,

answered.

The world,

still bare,

began to soften at its edges.

Light moved differently across it;

as if it remembered how to touch.

I did not rush toward it.

Hope, after such cold,

arrives carefully;

a tentative guest,

knocking softly,

waiting to be believed.

But I opened the window;

just a little,

and let the brightness in.

---

Unearthed

Beneath the long hush of winter,

something in me kept breathing.

Not hope; something quieter,

more stubborn than that.

Then light; arriving

without ceremony,

found its way in.

The dark did not leave;

it softened,

made room.

And I,

slow,

astonished,

began to open.

Not new,

but newly willing to live.

---

Fertile

The dark holds its breath.

What I believed lost, gathers

readying for light.

---

Barefoot

The grass takes me in;

cool, unfiltered,

like it has been waiting.

I answer with bare skin,

with breath that finally

belongs to me.

Each step loosens something

I didn’t know I’d been carrying.

The wind leans close;

a low, steady hum

of possibility.

I am not running

from anything worth keeping.

I am moving,

wholly, toward the life

that has been calling me

by name.

---

A wonderful set of prompts by Laura Catanzano

Thank you!