Bidding to the tides

Piece 1: 

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Bodies washed by shores of crescent moons, will overflow into the lakes and rivers; Leaving all of self behind into the tides for new waves to pull into the deep.

It’ll slowly become a home…

I’ll slowly become your ghost

A reflection in the windows of yesterday’s lament

We’ll wisp upon past moments

Reconcile with regret – admire it all the same

Whisk away worries into dreams, as our bones dismantle under limelight

and the moon keeps storing small debts of silver on the waters.

Night after night she signs our names in foam,

then erases them when the gulls cry and the harbor yawns.

Let the tides be our wisdom:

pushing, yielding, learning the shape of our grief.

Let the pull be gentle as a lover’s hand at dawn,

or fierce as the seam between two storms — both sculpt us.

We are patient chisels and patient clay; the sea drafts patience in our marrow.

We trade our footprints for shells,

our boasts for nets of quiet things — the soft wreckage of afternoons, the good ache of being slightly undone.

Under the crescent, every loss is catalogued as light;

every leaving becomes a map.

You will find me in the hollow of a lighthouse, humming the tune of your name.

When the world tilts and asks what was worth keeping,

answer with the small heat of ordinary mornings:

bread, a chipped mug, your laughter.

We will carry those like compass stars, and they will guide the evenings home.

The moon will pull at our ribs and teach us how to open again.

So let the currents take what must be taken — leaves, old vows, dried stones —

and let the returned be kinder: fragments polished by friction, edges softened into opal.

We, in our patient erosion, become something new: less frantic, more certain,

a covenant written not in ink but in salt, in breath, in the slow agreement to stay.

When I am only echo,

when you trace my name on someone else’s palm,

remember the way a tide remembers its moon

never quite the same, always faithful.

We orbit one another in the small physics of longing:

pull, pause, return.

And in that turning there is grace enough to call this living.

So fold your hands into the night and rest

the sea will speak your lullaby.

I’ll be the driftwood that keeps your doorway ajar

the quiet keeper of your light.

We will be tide and moon and everything between: endless, patient, bright.

As long as the sea remembers its shore, I will remember you.

Piece 2: 

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I fold these tides into my chest because I am both harbor and how the harbor is named.

I am the moon that remembers its own pull; I am the salt that remembers its own bruise.

When I seat myself at the low table of my nights, I ask only for honest company: my own breath, my own scars.

I trace the same old constellations on the inside of my skull and learn a new language for longing.

I become the first witness to my forgetting and the last to forgive it.

My poems are not offerings to gods I do not know, but receipts kept in the pocket of my coat —

proof that I loved, that I lost, that I returned the next morning to make coffee and begin again.

I call myself by the names I hid in other people's mouths: child, thief, pilgrim, anchor.

Each syllable sounds like a small unlocking.

Here I hold my hands out like lanterns and admit how I fracture: into music, into ache, into stubborn light.

I am the moth and also the window I knock against; I am the moth that chooses the burn.

There is mercy in choosing the wound that teaches you a way forward.

I pet the scarred places as if they were maps; I read my own routes when the path is lost.

When the tide pulls, I learn the vocabulary of loss — not as absence but as changeable grammar.

I write, therefore I tide: ebbing pages and incoming sentences that reshape the shore of me.

I am not waiting for permission to be holy; I wash my own hands in the moon’s silver and keep them warm.

My tenderness is not a gift to be earned; it is the workbench I use to fix the world when it cracks.

I sharpen my sentences like oars. I row toward the parts of myself I have been ashamed to name.

When dawn folds its paper map, I stay up and trace the coastlines with my finger until they look like neighborhoods.

I keep a ledger of small graces — a neighbor's hello, the way rain remembers the roof — and these accumulate into a life.

If I must be a ghost someday, let me haunt my own house first, arranging books by the spine I loved most.

Write to yourself as if you are the most urgent letter you will ever send: no postage, no waiting.

Sign it with the parts of you that did not ask to be perfect.

Bind the folds with the quiet promise to come back and read it aloud, to correct where memory lied.

Tell yourself the truth: that being your own muse is not vanity but survival.

You will need a witness who knows how the light falls behind your ribs

.

So I will keep naming. I will keep pulling the tide toward the small harbor of my hands.

I will be the lighthouse and the ship, the rope that ties them both, trembling and steady.

And if the world forgets songs, I will hum them into the pillow until morning learns them all again.

Because I am the beginning I keep returning to — because I am the person who must live with the answer.

I am my own moon; I am my own sea. I write to stay true to that.