What the Roots Remember, What the Branches Dream

The stones lean in

to hear my name

as I pass—

as if memory has a mouth

and has been waiting

for me to reply.

I come from a lineage

that buried only the truths

they could not bear to repeat.

The rest was pressed into dirt,

left for the roots to carry—

quiet archivists

of everything we survived

and everything we failed to say.

What is buried still remembers.

What is stolen still clings.

Under the oaks,

where blood once soaked the soil,

the warning remains:

the land never forgets the names.

And still—

I press my palm to the bark,

feeling the slow heartbeat

of something older than grief.

There is always a root

that leads back

to the first version of myself,

the one who could still hear

the hum beneath the ivy,

the one who trusted the earth

before she trusted her own voice.

But growth asks for more

than remembering.

Branches do not apologize

for wanting the sky.

So I rise—

spine learning the long,

aching language

of reaching.

I stretch toward whatever light

will have me,

toward the future that keeps

calling my name

in wind-syllables.

The forest holds the sky in place

the way memory

holds the soul—

not as an anchor

but as a promise:

you were made to rise

from what rooted you.

I do not shed my past;

I lift it.

A thousand rings spiraled

into bone—

ancestral, unbroken,

a map etched in ash and bark

carried forward.

This is how a life grows:

rooted in what was,

reaching for what could be,

branch by trembling branch,

toward the light

that finally feels

like home.