(One Shot Wednesday)

I imagined it as

the gray silk of a woman

a woman with fine lines,

arthritic hands, palms open.

I imagined it as

a whisper from the divine

given over the passage of time,

a sacred record of what is.

But grace, what is grace,

but the ashes left on your skin

after the burning;

a dim relief in the darkest corners

of the human heart

where you have to push on

with all that’s severed inside you,

all that’s torn, all that’s been stripped.

It is not in your years but in your grit—

what you will sacrifice to earn wholeness.

Grace is clutching fingers, bleeding knees, broken beliefs,

a body climbing jagged glass to end the night.

Grace is the throttle of your will, and grace

is the breath you take after you have fallen.