The Elixir of Forgiveness
Written: September 17, 2025, for contest sponsored by: Kai Michael Neumann
Quote: "Forgiveness is the fragrance flowers give when they are crushed". By Rumi
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Forgiveness is not dulcet or facile—
It is a desultory pilgrimage,
a diaphanous veil over bruised truths,
a furtive lilt in the throat of time.
It begins in the inglenook of ache,
where erstwhile wounds murmur in penumbra,
And ebullience feels as betrayal.
There, the soul must dissemble its pride,
imbue its scars with emollient grace.
The heart, once a halcyon lagoon,
now languors in imbroglio and languor,
its efflorescence buried beneath elision,
It's an effervescent hope, a vestigial moiety.
Yet forgiveness arrives, such as petrichor—
redolent, evocative, ephemeral.
It gambols through the gossamer dusk,
a fetching ripple in the future.
It is not a panacea, but a palimpsest,
a pastiche of pain and propinquity,
where even nemesis may become nectar,
and sorrowful echoes find serendipity.
Forgiveness is the elixir we resist,
the embrocation that stings before it soothes.
It asks for forbearance, not forgetting,
for love, not leisure, for lissome strength.
It is the ineffable act of inure—
to hold the harm, then allow it to pass.
A mellifluous undoing of the pyrrhic,
a sumptuous surrender to the soul’s own lilt.
So let it be your talisman,
your tinkling umbrella in the storm.
Forgiveness is not weakness—it is glamour,
the quintessential grace that makes us whole.
Copyright ©
Sotto Poet
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