On New Beginnings and Fresh Starts

I once believed that all the old scenes and worries and voices of my life,

Incessant and demanding as nightmares, would forever play on repeat.

Sometimes I even believed they were always meant to, and they

Pushed me to my knees until my bones began to shake.

But after every shock, jolt, heart pang, and bump in the road,

After every discouragement and strain and heartsickness I’ve ever known,

I have had a revelation:

This is only the Beginning.

The World stretches out vast at my feet, and it brims with promise,

Oasis after oasis, a Stepping Stone palace.

It calls to me — it has always been calling —  and I am unafraid

Of the scrapes on my knees, or the ugly purple bruises flowering across my heart —

They do not rule me.

For the air is rife with the petrichor of a thousand sweet autumn rains,

Pure as Silence — the earth lies glazed in white-hot liquid moon,  

The world garlanded in marigolds like bursts of fire —

It stands open and changing and good, and I —

Little old mousy me with the quiet voice, the mismatched socks —

I am an Eagle with bronze wings resplendent in the sun, rippling, reeling —

All-consuming darkness cannot catch me, nor do I resign myself to its stain.

For I am a china-cup fairy floating through every unsaid word — I flit iridescent and bold,

And I no longer settle — settling was made for dust and dirt, but not for me.

So I shall not hide or be played with, call myself small or waste my time —

No, Time is on my side and I’ll be on Hers.

Only perk up your ears and you’ll see that

My song is aflight — rippling, reeling — my heart holds every Love Poem I’ve ever composed, all the Letters I sent and all the ones I meant to, the grandest Symphonies and fervent Declarations of eons of history, tiny Hopes so tender they eclipse the sun. It holds the Here and the Now, every shard of every memory of your Eyes, the shrill battle Cry and the croaking screech of Despair echoing in the night, the Wondrous and Mystical, the Improbable and the Lovely and the Raw, the beautiful Possibility of Lantern-light in the Dark.

For This is only the Beginning,

And This is what I choose.

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