The Room Where Everything was Stored

The room is small, one window, the pane

speckled with a few quiet drops of yesterday's rain.

A kind of crypt with objects we've outgrown.

Gone, the evidences carved on the bark,

every footprint leading elsewhere,

dissolving into the dusk-hungry ground.

A bevy of shadows gathers,

their whispers clotting the air—

that dense anthology of slumber and silence.

Sadness has roots here.

It climbs the walls with practiced fingertips,

blooms in the lamplight's gentle cough.

Within these corners,

a congregation of the cherished,

a makeshift altar for the absent.

We've laid them here, these tender artifacts,

like relics of a soft-spoken god,

their whispers the litany we recite.

Memories are the strangest fruit,

they hang, heavy with the ghost of tastes,

the chiaroscuro of vanished summers.

Each object, an echo,

a soft brush against the soul,

an apricot's blush, the fire's last breath.

What is tendered, what is kept—

as if a room could mend its own heart,

gently finger the text of our losses.