Waiting For the Miracle

The mighty incident to hoist you 

Out of the skin you’ve come to loathe,

Catapult you into the epic you sketched in idle dreams,

But never scratched onto the world’s stone face.

Papers pile, dishes grow foul, as you languish

For stars to compose your destiny in their cosmic dance,

You, the chosen, for whom the universe might,

Just might, conspire a spectacular favor.

In the dark, the monstrous shape of your life

Cowers; in daylight, mocking gratitude for breath.

This mess called living drags, drop by drop,

And decades slip like water through clenched hands.

You are not the lone bewildered beast.

The world offers peculiar communion —

The serpent blind beneath its stone slough,

Or the pupa that dies beneath a well-meaning stroke.

The tap-tap-tap on the shell’s concave walls —

A plea, no, a furious command to the cramped world:

Expand! I am more than this brittle enclosure.

Thus, wisdom stumbles in, late, uninvited,

To this midlife script, slashed and rewritten,

Frantic graffiti on the walls of existence,

The pressing, the twisting, every contorted push,

A rehearsal for the final, splendid exit.

One day, the wreckage blossoms to dawn —

You, awash with first light, bruised and radiant,

Beholding the dusk, with every splendid scar on display,

Whole, as only the fractured can truly be.