Panashe Chigwedere Poet Free verse

I'm Still Standing

There was a time I thought I had failed 
when daylight collapsed into midnight, and days once gilded with joy were rewritten as chapters of sorrow.  
Yet though the tempest raged and threatened to unmake me, the immutable truth remains: I am still standing.

I fall, and in the bruising I learn the architecture of rising.  
Dreams perish in my hands, only to resurrect with sturdier wings, baptized by fire.  
Mistakes arrive uninvited, but I gather their wisdom like stones and build altars of progress; I learn, and I move on.  
Every struggle, I now discern, is not a sentence but a setup  a scaffolding for the edifice of who I am becoming.

The new day comes, morning unfurls its weary light; night descends, and still we wake, and sleep, and wake again 
a quiet testament that existence itself is resilience.  
People distance themselves, familiar voices fade to silence, abandonment and forsakenness knock at my door 
and still, I am standing.

Tears fell, and then they dried, leaving salt trails as maps of where I’ve been.  
My mouth went arid from pleading, my knees swollen from the vigil of kneeling,  
prayers ascending like smoke that seemed to meet a sealed heaven.  
Hopelessness whispered that I was finished.  
But I am still standing.

Standing when ease has evacuated the room.  
Standing when my legs tremble and my heart drafts elegies.  
Because as long as breath remains my companion, the destination remains possible.  
Step by step, inch by inch  through shadow, through scorn, through silence  I advance.

I am not standing because the storm is absent;  
I am standing because I discovered I am the anchor.  
And if I can endure yesterday’s grave, I can inherit tomorrow’s crown.  
So let the winds testify: I was bowed, I was broken, but I was never buried.  
I’m still standing.

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