A love letter to everything I have survived

Darkness in its deepest sonder, desolation in its truest bareness, all embraced my shattered skin,

Enclothed in the tightness of survival, the light that belied in its invisibility propelled me to keep my hope akin.

Callous whispers of what I should have been recorded their acrostic tunes in the sparse of thin air,

Plunging into the waters of the uncertain, unconventionality called to me like the siren’s call to a sailor’s rhythmic flair.

--

Dancing in the fire, paddling through the rain,

Insanity brewed in the eyes of one who tried to remain sane.

Maybe I would have been a subject of fondness if conventionality ran through its norm within me,

But grace in its beauty befell me, as I found myself on the precipice of my poetry.

--

Words once spoken out of spite rendered my soul,

Innocence in its sensitive light attempted its best to forfeit its goal.

I once too wished to hurt them with swords of my inked rage,

Wars that are propelled when one falls out of love often simmer down with age.

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I knew light in its most virtuous stellar found me when I abandoned the urge to fight,

Every single battle that demanded evidence of my worthy might

When one heals, pain that lies confined in the depths screeches to be leashed.

Demanding to write a love letter to everything I survived, to shed who I was,

Through every morsel of my past, as the traumatic wheels of time in their flair beseeched.

--

I yearn for a love so loud that it heals every silent scream I ever roared,

A love that shines from within, where in radical acceptance of myself, my dreams soar.

Whether I am thirty or eighty, I hope my love finds me in every crevice of my being,

So when good things and new beginnings finally encapsulate me,

I let the radiance of goodness within me beam.

-Hridya Sharma