What We Leave Behind
A person leaves a memory,
a voice still breathing in an empty room;
a parent leaves a child's hand to hold
the wisdom gathered through a lifetime's bloom.
A lover leaves an absence at the door,
a chair untouched, a silence in the bed;
and words survive in letters, photographs,
small objects keeping what the heart once said.
Some leave a scar where tenderness once lay,
some leave a wound that time cannot erase;
some leave a garden, a house, a tree—
a changed and quiet place that bears their trace.
A life leaves footprints even after death,
a legacy written in another's days;
yet we abandon dreams we cannot carry,
and leave behind the selves we once displayed.
We cannot take our possessions into night,
nor carry earth's green forests when we go;
humanity leaves its shadow on the planet—
a wound, a wonder, and a debt we owe.
And long after memory has lost our name,
when even our last photograph is gone,
somewhere, somehow, because we once were here,
the darkness will be different from the dawn.
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