Signed, Darcy

I felt the transcendence from your heartbeat long after you left
felt it bleed across the waters that separated us,
seep into the hydrogen and sodium particles
heard it fall against the oxygen and saw it resting in my lungs.
Every night your voice arrived
to breathe onto my hollowed brain, to sooth the wild nerve endings
the impulses set off by a fierce longing at the emptiness you left
the lack of my impartial confidant.

We met in utero through a series of unprecedented coincidences
and fell in love with the easy friendship, the effortless laughter
you stole the nectar for yourself but I forgave you;
Throughout my sickness you stayed.

I write a letter to you daily so that you may have my words
the mundane nature of consonants
the realities of the vowels
the ceremony of sound;
to comfort you when nights grew cold and rations sparse
when the disease and blatant massacre seem infinite
to have the thought of home and familiarity
gliding in your bloodstream across the vast muscles
to have them whisper the sorrows of the world to you
reminders of how you create, not exclusively destroy.

To know you are a liberator.

It is not in the sun that you shine, or the moon, but the stars;
in the individual photons alighting on chapped lips
hidden inside the dew in the morning and the frost in the night,
racing around the shadows and the fortresses
across secret smiles and silent communication
in body language and siblings
not in love,
but in life.

In the black piano keys and mother’s wrinkles
I can read the admiration plain on their faces
in your daughter’s dimpled feet.

Signed, Darcy
♠ ♠ ♠
not entirely proud of this.