The Window That Knows Our Names
I waited where the bells forget their breath,
Where ancient hours lean barefoot into prayer,
Where time still tastes of honey mixed with death
And winds confess their psalms to silent air.
The moon was schooling rivers how to speak,
The stars were counting debts no soul could pay,
And God was writing names upon the weak
So none would truly vanish on their way.
No road was safe, no promise stood complete,
The earth was learning how to bruise and bloom,
Each stone remembered someone’s quiet feet,
Each leaf was writing letters to the tomb.
I stood with empty hands and borrowed light,
A stranger to the language of my pain,
Until your shadow entered through the night
And taught my heart the alphabet of rain.
You came with villages inside your eyes,
With ovens breathing bread into your voice,
With wells that kept the sky in their replies,
With fields that knew what hunger must rejoice.
Your sleeves still held the dust of childhood prayers,
Your palms were maps of long-forgiven wrongs,
You carried dawn in all your broken stares
And stitched the world together into songs.
I knew, without a vow, without a sign,
That love is fire disguised as gentle care,
A wound that turns our poverty to wine,
A cross we carry softly in the air.
It teaches blood to remember how to shine,
It teaches dust to dream it can be sky,
It writes eternity in fragile time,
And lets us kneel without explaining why.
We sat between the “never” and the “still,”
On stairs the centuries forgot to claim,
Where hope lay barefoot, trembling in its will,
And fear was learning how to say your name.
Your hand was shaking like a candle’s thought
Afraid to trust the wind with being alive,
Yet every silence that your breathing brought
Made something in my bones begin to thrive.
Each word you spoke rebuilt a fallen door,
Each pause restored a room I could not see,
You placed a roof above my inner war
And named my sorrow into dignity.
You taught my nights the habit of the sun,
You taught my wounds to open into trust,
You showed my heart that it was not alone
Inside the grammar of our shared dust.
Where do the tired go, you asked me low,
When even tears grow weary of their fall,
When prayers forget the names they used to know,
When winter moves its furniture through all?
I said: they go to songs that own no fear,
To fields where even God walks slow and bare,
To rooms where mothers keep the world sincere
By breaking bread and whispering repair.
They go to laws that heal without erasing,
To gentle truths that never raise a sword,
To places where forgiving is a tracing
Of fingerprints still warm upon the Lord.
They go to quiet rooms inside the soul
Where grief is taught to kneel and not to rot,
Where loss becomes a lantern, not a hole,
Where pain remembers what despair forgot.
And if tomorrow breaks us into years,
If work consumes our footprints into dust,
If history devours all our fears
And names are washed from stone because it must,
Then swear me this, with breath that does not lie:
Leave one small window open in your sleep,
So when my soul grows poor and I pass by,
It may still find your silence wide and deep.
Let it sit gently on your dreaming flame,
Like ash that still remembers how to burn,
Let it pronounce your fragile, holy name
And bless the road it does not yet return.
For somewhere God is counting all our days
Like coins kept warm inside a broken hand,
And somewhere love is teaching dust to praise
The brief forever we can understand.
So when the night grows narrow, cold, and thin,
And even stars forget their ancient rhyme,
Remember this: we did not disappear within,
We simply learned to live outside of time.
Your name once saved the echo of my name,
Your silence kept my shadow from the flood,
And love, still burning gently in its flame,
Writes both our hearts into the breath of God.
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