Dan Enache Poet Free verse

The Fortress Within

The Fortress Within

The walls I built so no one could ever touch or wound me again,
grew perfect, straight, and cold, like winters carved from flint by frozen men,
stone upon stone I raised them with hands of terror and of sleepless guard,
a fortress with no gates, no windows, and no law within its yard.

Now I am safe at last — no spear can ever break me anymore,
no foreign word can split my chest and make it bleed down to the core,
but in the darkness between walls, where not a whisper finds its way,
I'm locked in with the architect of fear, who taught me how to build my grave.

He is the shadow that dictated every slab in silence grim,
the gentle executioner who whispered every soul hides sin,
I built a fortress against enemies — and stayed inside with him,
with the jailer from within, more hungry, crueler, and more faithful still.

My fortress is a basalt skull in which the echo kneels to pray,
every thought returns to me like a crippled bird that lost its way,
through the single crack there falls a yellow ray like a torch of old,
showing me my pallid face — a prisoner in my own rope's hold.

For so many years I took the armor for a second, newer skin,
I never saw the wall that stops the hail also stops the dew from coming in,
that the fortress which no longer lets the evil cross its floor,
no longer lets love catch its flame, nor light stretch out across the door.

So I begin to pull one stone away, then another, with nails worn through,
not to surrender to the storm, but to let back into my marrow's room
the sun unseen for far too long, the wind, and one warm reaching hand,
for better wounded in the world than king above a grave of sand.

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