Love's Unanswered Knocks

Love’s Unanswered Knocks

She reached with hands like wilted petals,

soft as dawn, fragile, pleading—

but love was wind, a thing that passed,

sharp and hollow, never heeding.

The clock was set, the window brief,

a sacred hour not returned.

A child’s heart must drink of kindness

or shrivel where the thirst still burns.

But kindness was a foreign language,

her home spoke only ice and stone.

Laughter cracked like breaking branches,

love was something left unknown.

The air was thick with words like lashes,

hands that struck or pulled away.

A name could be a curse, a weapon,

a silence worse than fists that swayed.

No arms, no eyes, no gentle murmur,

no mirror bright to cast her form.

She learned herself through cruel reflections,

through punishment, through being scorned.

Yet hunger lingers past the hour,

when lips grow dry and skin turns thin.

She stitched her need to every shadow,

sought home in places love had never been.

She knocked on doors of frozen houses,

where silence sat with folded hands,

where love was measured, tight and fleeting,

like water poured through clenched demands.

Each lover wore her father’s absence,

each silence hummed her mother’s chill.

She curled inside their empty offerings,

a child still searching—searching still.

For love had left and time had sealed it,

a gate long shut, a crucial phase.

Now all she knew were echoes, mirrors,

that cast her back in loveless haze.

But listen—healing hums in places

where grief is met with open hands.

Where someone dares to sit beside her,

not turn away, not make demands.

To grieve, to rage, to name the missing,

to hold herself in arms unseen—

to know the love she sought was waiting,

not in the past, but in between.

For though the gate was shut behind her,

there’s still a way, though not the same.

A different path, through thorn and sorrow,

where she becomes her own new name.