Harvesting the Flesh of Days

Hands, open, close, trembling over the soil of myself,

fingers brushing the ribs that shield the heart,

fingers tracing the curve of what keeps me alive,

pulling marrow from husks that whisper of sun and storm.

The body is a field, the lungs the wind over wheat,

the veins rivers of red rushing like rain through furrows,

and sometimes the blood spills too quietly

for hope to notice, for the hands to catch.

I gather what I can:

the pulse beneath the breastbone,

the flutter behind closed eyes,

the marrow of grief tucked into hidden hollows.

Just when I was ready to let go,

to surrender to the dry dust of despair,

the Lord sends water from the sky,

pours it through the leaves, through my ribs,

through the veins that tremble with the memory of fear,

and I am fed, even in the place I thought empty.

Harvests do not wait. They rise in mist and tremor,

cling to the edges of sorrow and laughter alike.

I have carried chestnuts and clay in my palms,

cherries stained with blood-light,

fragments of old songs tucked in the corner of barns,

fragments of prayers whispered over the bones of ancestors.

The thrill is in the taking, the trembling in the marrow,

the prophecy of tomorrow hidden in the husk of today.

Every pulse, every root, every stolen moment

is a whisper: keep this, it will feed you,

even when the world would have you fall.

I gather the bodies of my childhood,

the small betrayals, the laughter, the vanished cousins,

and I carry them like corn in burlap sacks,

like broken eggs cradled in copper bowls.

Even grief is a harvest, even absence a seed.

The wind shakes the orchard, the river runs backwards, red and trembling,

and I see myself:

one hand full of harvest, one hand empty,

the shadows of women I have never met

falling into the rows I have made.

The earth feeds the heart, the sky feeds the blood,

and I understand that even in the moments of near surrender

the Lord provides.

He threads water into veins, soil into marrow,

sunlight into ribs, and hope into trembling hands.

Gathering is an act of keeping, of making whole what wants to scatter.

I take the flesh of days, the bones of light, the marrow of memory,

and I carry it forward

into the small eternity of now.