What The Sky Could Not Keep

There was a season
when everything I loved
left in flashes—
too sudden
to understand,
too beautiful
to suspect.
I searched the ground
for explanations,
finding only
charred silence
and the faint scent
of something
that had burned
long before I noticed
the smoke.
Grief is peculiar.
It teaches your hands
to hold
what no longer exists.
For months,
I carried absence
like a lantern.
Its weight
bent my shoulders,
yet somehow
it lit the road
I believed
had ended.
Then winter passed.
The trees
did not apologize
for losing their leaves.
The rivers
never asked permission
to keep flowing.
Even the dawn
arrived each morning
without explaining
where it had been.
So I, too,
learned
that survival
is not a loud thing.
It is the courage
to wake again.
To trust
that brokenness
is not a permanent address.
Now,
when night gathers
its waiting crowd,
I look upward
not because
I expect
the darkness
to save me,
but because
I finally understand
that the brightest things
were never meant
to stay forever.
Their purpose
was simply
to remind us
that even
the briefest light
can teach a heart
how to find
its own.
Perhaps
that is why
fireworks
always disappear—
so we remember
that the sky
was beautiful
long before
they arrived.