Relinquishments Poems | Examples

Aetheric Lighthouse

Before the dawn could teach the city how to wake,
I found my face where old relinquishments still burned;
Each breath became the mason of the walls it chose to break,
Till silence knew the man whom suffering had unlearned.
One leaf upon a wintered tree revised the season's claim—
Love signed where time had long forgotten every name.

Then midnight raised a lighthouse in the chambers of my breast,
Whose beam sought not the sea, but all I'd left behind;
My shipwrecked selves came homeward, neither anchored nor confessed,
For every lost horizon had been harbouring the mind.
The future was no country waiting somewhere to begin—
It gathered like a coastline from the tides I kept within.

So now I ask no heaven for a kingdom yet to rise;
The stars inherit only what the steadfast spirit proves.
Each faithful heart becomes the grammar by which darkness dies,
The unseen shore toward which eternity still moves.
The universe remembers, not by thunder, throne, or flame,
But when one inward lighthouse quietly learns its Name.