In the corners of my soul, I harbor a poem—a fragile creation woven from ink and longing. It began as a tender bud, but somewhere along the way, it withered. Perhaps it was the touch of human hands, the clumsy fingers that stained its purity.
“We poison love,” the poem whispers, its syllables laden with regret. We, the architects of our own undoing, wielded our doubts and insecurities like venom. We injected doubt into its veins, watched as its verses convulsed, twisted, and lost their innocence.
Yet, despite the poison, I return to it. I read those lines, tracing their contours with trembling fingertips. Why? To deceive myself, perhaps. To believe that love can be resurrected, that its decay is reversible. I read it in quiet moments, when the world outside blurs into insignificance, and the poem becomes my sanctuary.
I seek solace in its stanzas, hoping they hold the antidote to my own sadness. The words transport me to calm places—the sun-dappled meadows, the moon-kissed shores—where love once bloomed unencumbered. There, I shed some of my sorrow, like leaves falling gently from a tree.
But we, as mortals, are complicit in the unraveling of all things we cherish. We facilitate the end, not out of malice, but because it is our nature. The same hands that cradle love also wield the blade that severs it. We are both creator and destroyer, caught in an eternal dance of birth and decay.
And the man—the powerful creator of gods—he too bears responsibility. For every deity he breathes into existence, he births a demon. The balance tips, and love becomes a fragile equation, teetering on the edge of oblivion.
Obsolete miracles, you say? Perhaps they exist in the spaces between our breaths, the gaps where hope lingers. Maybe, just maybe, the poem holds a secret—a forgotten incantation—that can mend what we’ve broken. Or perhaps it’s a relic of a time when miracles were commonplace, before cynicism crept into our hearts.
So I read, and I invoke. I summon the ghosts of forgotten wonders, hoping they’ll dance upon the faded parchment. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll breathe life into the poem once more, and love will rise from its ashes.
©️Beatriz Esmer
Beatriz Esmer 