Before the Battle

A pilgrimage of undoing,

Failures shedding their skins.

A long unmaking of shadows

And so the trembling begins.

Years folding into each other,

Battles dissolving in dust.

Transformation never sudden,

Hope merely a quiet thrust

Against the grain of myself

Mind and heart in a looping war,

Echoes wrestling echoes,

Each one unsure.

Creation's hands still shape me,

But forward frays at the edges;

Faith thins to a whisper

When the world tilts wrong.

A traveler mid-journey,

A wanderer unreturned;

A stone breathing in the sling,

Waiting for a moment unearned.

Walls hum before falling,

Seas hold their breath in salt;

Perfume sleeps in straw,

Prophecy curls in vaults.

The coming light gathers itself

Just beyond sight;

Two shadows hang in grief

Before love rewrites the night.

Bread remembers the breaking

Before it breaks;

Blood dreams of healing

Before the wound wakes.

There is a thin, unmoving instant

Between petition and wonder

An unnamed silence

Suspended between history

And its hope.

I am not ready

For the giant behind the horizon;

Not the David in the stories,

Not even the hand

That reaches for stones.

I am not ready

For the battle forming in the dark.

Still

The battle waits,

And I am its unfinished mark.