POEM - The Fractured Halo

It was not forged in furnaces divine,

Nor hammered on a celestial anvil's face,

But gathered from the light of a late sign,

And given form with unassuming grace.

A perfect ring, a never-setting sun

To crown the deeds I thought were surely done

With purest motive, selfless, and aligned—

A testament to a perfected mind.

The first hairline, a filament so fine,

Appeared not from a cataclysm’s blow,

But from a small, uncompassionate line

I spoke to watch a lesser spirit bow.

A crack so small no angel could have seen,

A whisper of the vain and the unseen,

A filament of pride, a brittle thread

Where one small shimmer of the light fell dead.

Then came the fault, a jagged, splintering vein,

When faced with true and unrefined despair—

A beggar’s hand extended in the rain,

I turned from, citing I had none to spare.

The jolt was not a sound, but a lack thereof,

A silent subtraction from above;

A wedge of darkness in the golden band,

Now broken by the weight of a withheld hand.

The fractures spread, a spider’s web of blame,

With every time I claimed a debt was owed,

Or hung my head and nursed a secret shame

For imperfections on the path I strode.

Each time I chose the castle over the hut,

And bolted my compassion’s door and shut,

A new flaw sparked across the fragile rim,

Dimming the luminescence of the hymn.

It did not shatter in a single fall,

But shed its light in slivers and in shards,

Each splinter singing a reluctant call

To notice what it truly guards—or discards.

It fell in segments, not a crown, but pieces,

As all my pious posturing decreases,

To lie in fragments at my stumbling feet,

A shattered echo of the holy and complete.

I gathered up the glimmering, broken things,

Each shard a mirror to a different flaw:

One showed the hollow echo when pride sings,

Another, the retreat from mercy’s law.

This one, the love I measured and confined,

That one, the deaf ear to a human mind,

A mosaic of every choice amiss,

A biography of avarice.

And in the ruins of that crafted light,

I feared the darkness would be absolute.

A permanent and unrelenting night

Where no attenuated hope could root.

But as I cupped the fragments in my palm,

A strange and unexpected sense of calm

Began to rise—not from a distant sphere,

But from the brokenness collected here.

For in the cracks, where heaven’s light had fled,

A different kind of brilliance took its place.

Not borrowed glory from the holy dead,

But something raw, and human, and of base.

The light that now shone through the fractured design

Was not a perfect, uniform, straight line,

But danced and leapt in unpredictable ways,

Illuminating truth, not just the praise.

It lit the face of those I once called weak,

And showed me strength in their enduring tears.

It gave the broken-hearted room to speak,

And filled my previously deafened ears.

The prism of my faults now split the beam

To color a more compassionate dream,

Where saints are not the ones who never break,

But those who gather fragments for compassion’s sake.

So let the perfect halo stay on high,

Upon the brows of those who need no grace.

My crown is made of flaws that terrify,

And yet, somehow, have found their rightful place.

It is not whole, it does not blind the sight,

It is a constellation in the night—

A map of where I fell and where I grew,

A fractured thing, but somehow, truer.

Short Summary:

"The Fractured Halo" traces the deconstruction of a self-perceived identity of purity and perfection. The halo, a symbol of this idealized self, fractures incrementally not through grand sins, but through small, human failures of compassion, pride, and withheld grace. The poem argues that the breaking is not an end, but a necessary transformation. True light is found not in flawless, borrowed divinity, but in the humble, prismatic brilliance that shines through our acknowledged fractures, illuminating a path of deeper empathy and authentic humanity. The fractured halo, therefore, becomes a more honest and valuable crown than the perfect one ever was.