Crimson Pages.

      Crimson Pages

I hold my heart between thumb and quill,

still beating, wetter than ink can tell—

each pulse a syllable straining for sky,

each drop a confession too jagged to whisper,

so I split silence open and let it spill.

Memory sleeps like glass beneath dust,

fragile until a careless breath trembles it;

I breathe, and suddenly shards glitter,

mirroring faces that called me unbreakable—

I gather them, bleeding, to prove I feel.

Night is a patient surgeon, trimming hope,

suturing shadows where laughter once lived;

I lie awake on the theatre of paper,

scalpel-moon carving verses from marrow,

trusting dawn to anesthetize the ache.

Every wound owns a vocabulary of thunder—

it rumbles in my veins, obstinate, raw,

so I tongue the storm into rhyme and metre

until lightning uncoils, gentled,

becoming light enough to guide a child home.

I write of rivers older than my sorrow,

waters that learned to hum through stones;

they teach me endurance is music,

that even bruised currents reach the sea—

I follow their tempo towards forgiveness.

The page forgives nothing, yet accepts all:

it swallows my flaws like fertile soil,

and something green insists on sprouting—

a leaf shaped like possibility,

fluttering where emptiness once ruled.

At last I stitch the final line to my skin,

feel the poem tighten, warm, alive;

here, hurt is threaded into wholeness,

here, bleeding translates into breath—

and I rise, unburdened, on paper wings.

©Bunguswa.™