Anthony Hanible

The Kidnapping Of My Heart

My heart was a sealed vessel

Anchored in the silt of its own history

Unmoving

Unlit

Then you appeared

Not as a person

But as a phenomenon

A shift in the wind’s grammar

A tremor in the architecture of silence

The vessel stirred

Its ropes frayed

Its anchor forgot the seabed

You did not touch it

You did not call it

You simply existed

With the inevitability of a rising moon

And the tide obeyed you

My heart lifted

A lantern pulled upward

By a force older than desire

Older than names

It rose into your orbit

A small celestial fugitive

Caught in the gravity

Of an unfamiliar star

Now I walk the world

With a constellation missing

A vacancy that glows

Like a wound made of light

Call it kidnapping

If you need a mortal word

But my heart was taken

The way water is taken by the sky

Not stolen

But summoned