When Night Becomes a Door: A Poem for Gentle Resilience

When the night quietly covers your windowpane with its velvety darkness,

Note also that this is both an end and a door.

Breathe slow: the small breath is a ship, the inhale a compass,

the exhale a map that clears the fog from old directions.

You are not the last echo of yesterday; you are the voice forming now.

This is a poem that speaks of gentle resilience, a brief love poem crafted for weary souls,

a poem about healing, about learning to tie kindness into your wrists

Thus, every clenched fist recalls the way to unfurl.

Extend a palm to the morning and the morning will teach you patience:

dew needs time to be a jewel on grass.

If grief be weather you cannot modify, then learn the language of the weather.

Call the gray: say it out loud as if you were christening some favorite child's toy.

Then, she placed in the ribbon-striped box and carefully set the gift on the porch.

They will not go away; the storms maintain their forms; but you will discover

the porch can hold many boxes and still invite visitors.

Create your list of small acts of bravery:

water a plant, respond to a letter, forgive a face in the mirror.

Action is light's shorthand; it writes the future in ink that dries.

When you pencil in "I forgive" in the margin of an average day,

It is as radical as planting in the winter.

Love is not only fireworks; it is the steady hand that irons shirts,

the recipe repeated until the taste becomes tradition.

The voice which reminds you of your name when you forget.

And the person who discovers the lost umbrella of yours.

A love poem sings these small domestic miracles into gold.

To heal, converse with yourself as you would with someone you cherish:

wonder how their day was, listen as they recount their pains,

and don't offer any solution unless you're requested.

Language is like a bedside lamp; it cannot cure all the troubles,

but it will keep the dark manageable.

Create a ritual, no matter how small:

coffee in the morning, walk that gathers the birdsong

A diary page wherein you unload the weighty coins of yesterday.

Rituals are anchors with fine threads; they keep you steady

but not cruelly bound — they allow you to return.

Keep in mind that courage is frequently a silent business: one step after another,

sending the first message, leaving the room when silence sharpens.

Courage does not have to be boisterous; it can be gentle, unassuming, and resolute.

When memory seeks to draw you in like a tide,

Learn how to float regardless--imagine your abdomen as a raft,

Take the waves as they come under you, as the trains you watch from the station.

You will not miss the station indefinitely; you will find yourself boarding new trains.

This poem is a map and a mirror and a small toolkit:

it provides verbs — breathe, name, water, write, forgive — glitter-free tools.

Use them every day. They will create muscles you can depend on:

muscles of returning, of closing a wound without tearing the skin.

When you find yourself in the habit of comparing with broken bits,

as opposed to measuring by what you've fixed: a sentence, a spotted cup,

A promise fulfilled on a rainy day. Measure by tenderness given away and

returned. Finally, when darkness wraps the night again, know this: Beds

may welcome both sadness and starlight. Sleep is not forgetting; it is an

apprenticeship in gentleness. Awake to your own small testimony — to how

you loved when loving was hard — and carry that light into the kind of day

that demands from you the subtlest kinds of courage. Read this aloud when

the world is just too much. Carry it in any handy place close at hand. Let it

be the soft hyperlink you click on for courage.