Between words
she places perfect distances
where meaning blooms
in the quiet spaces.

-

The day ambered,
petalbright in its corner,
while the rest blurred
into hushedpaper light,
a half-kept summer
in the cupboard of my mind.

-

Her faith walks beside him,
asking nothing, naming nothing,
yet never straying.

-

"Freedom Speaks"

I am freedom, yes,
but I am also discipline,
patience,
and the duty
to name a wrong as wrong
even when it wears the face
of your own choosing.

I am not the prize of a single dawn,
but the breath of each day you rise.
Guard me
from hands that sell the soil for gold,
from tongues that crown my name
yet hollow my truth.

I live in your questioning,
in your honest labor,
in your refusal to bend
before greed in any guise.

Remember
I was never the gift of a few.
I am the solemn debt of all.

-

The country,
we expect it to hold us, feed us,
be mother, be guard, be healer.
We dream of leaders like saints,
yet we do not wash
our own steps before
entering her house.
We expect her to rise—
and forget she is made of us.

For in the end,
freedom is not only the flag,
nor the treaty,
nor the home unbroken—
it is the spirit
that bows to nothing
but truth.

-

the duty to keep it
from becoming a memory.

-

Love is time,
creased not with age,
but with offering.
each second placed carefully
into another’s
unspeaking hands.

-

not to flee,
but to measure the air
that was always mine;
each feather holds
a century of waiting,
each beat distills the hush
between leaving and
becoming.

-

throwing a stone in a well
you wait for the echo,
but it never comes.

-

She walks through her outline,
finding fewer walls than before.

-