poem submitted to "What We Leave Behind" poetry contest, Sotto Poet, sponsor, October 5, 2026
By the time weather has thinned our names on stone, by the time wedding china sleeps beneath attic dimness and careful hands divide the relics of our brief occupancy, something of us is already elsewhere. A woman pauses once beside a river carrying snowmelt. Years later, a child she never knew develops a habit of lingering near moving water, unable to explain the pull. A man looks up from a gas station pump to watch geese cross a bruised November sky. Decades later, someone abandons a troubling thought simply to follow dark wings threading the clouds. The world administers its exchanges invisibly. We leave traces in the grammar of other lives: a manner of listening, a particular mercy, the instinct to choose wonder over certainty. These travel farther than memory, like seeds hidden in the cuffs of a traveler’s coat. Perhaps death is not a vanishing, not an ending but a breaking open of these bright unnoticed fragments entrusted to wind. Long afterward, someone beneath an unfamiliar constellation will turn toward beauty for no discernible reason, never knowing they have wandered briefly through the weather of another soul.
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