That Which Catches Light

Dark flecks drift into the wind;
ravens scattering against a pale sky
a sky bruised raw
by thoughts unspoken.

Raindrops wander on fractured glass,
uncertain where we’ll meet
or when we’ll fall.

I have been the shattered thing:
shivering on cold stone,
left in pieces beneath
the weight of my own dreaming.

A constellation of mistakes:
wants and needs
glittering like fallen stars.

I have burned that way.
But fire, bolder than I, taught
how to rise,
still flickering,
and hold close what glows.

So I gathered all the blaze spared:
singed edges, crooked hopes,
trembling shards
that remembered light.

I stacked them, stone on stone,
and though the seams still show,
I called it a beginning.

And I—
I am not whole,
but held.
Suspended in the ache
between what was and what longs to be.

Because
a leaf remembers the tree,
a spark remembers the flame,
I remember the world
that razed and remade me.

So here I belong.
In the trying,
in the fragments,
in the hands that rebuild.

To live
is to keep becoming.
To lift again and again
from the ashes of almosts.

If I am but one shard
in all this fractured glass,
then let me be the piece
that catches light.

That remembers the sky
even
as
it
fell.

---

Written by Mason Lai, a California high schooler. I hope you felt something when you read this.