She Sets a Match to the Wick

She was given darkness

so her hands could see.

-

Before birds remember sound

she reaches for the lantern—

brass cool,

silence alive.

-

She wipes the glass

until it squeaks,

O Light, O Light,

and sets a match to the wick.

-

They ask, Why polish what you can’t see?

She smiles and says: The world is a veil.

When they leave her food and water,

then sustenance was written.

When they don’t: then hunger was written.

-

Once she begged for vision.

It came—lightning naming every leaf,

a knife of borders.

Take this blade away, she cried,

and the Beloved did.

-

Doubt lingers,

a tremor nested in her ageing limbs.

Faith must buckle, she says,

or it cannot kneel,

and sets a match to the wick.

-

Moths stagger in, remembering.

Wind recites surrender at the door.

Strangers warm their hands

to the lantern she keeps alive,

and call her hermit.

-

Others kick her bowl away,

steal the crust,

spit at the silence,

press her face into the filth,

and test her flesh.

She kneels in mud and pain

and sets a match to the wick.

-

Then pain becomes a lens, ground thin.

Light threads itself through her like water

finding a needle’s eye.

In her chest glows red

an iron brazier,

her spine rings like a minaret,

and the room learns the posture of prayer,

as she sets a match to the wick.

-

When she sleeps, she dreams corridors—

mirrors, smoke, repeating elsewheres.

Not a face, only refraction:

one lantern pressed to a thin wall

fractals a thousand rooms.

Many worlds; one passage—

a pin-sized mercy in the dark.

-

She wakes whispering,

Let the light pass through me,

not name me,

and sets a match to the wick.

-

At first sound, her hand finds brass—

silence alive, and

with trembling hands that long for the burn,

she sets

a match to the wick.

.