Heartbeat
A poem of grief, of loss, of a sound that was meant to bring comfort becoming a reminder of fragility and mortality
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A Note: I am no poet and I do not often read such works, but the words for this story did not fit in any tale I could craft, yet needed a voice anyways. So here’s an attempt at a medium I’m unfamiliar with, but attempted all the same.
The sound of a heartbeat has never provided comfort.
.
The rhythm of life drumming behind its cage of bone,
Sustaining the spirit of light behind every bright eye,
Become a ticking clock winding down to its last beat.
One unbroken step closer in a race to the final breath,
Each strike keeping pace to the clock of endings.
The only reward for finishing a permanence of silence.
The quiet closure of a life so loud, so bright,
.
The memories keep loved ones up at night in the haunted echoes left behind.
.
That most vital sound only ever reminded me of the fragility of life,
One small hammer sparking the light to keep it all going.
Each strike a defiance against that inevitable oblivion,
Each spark igniting every moment that brought love and scars,
Keeping us illuminated and strong through every high and low,
Even when we wish it would stop the pain is so great,
That resilient heart lets the little flame flicker on and on,
Until wounds close and breaks mend and the day is no longer grey.
One mortal song to keep the night away,
Yet for all it survives,
.
How easily it can find its silence.
.
Perhaps I knew the heart’s strumming as a different tune once,
When my world was all darkness and blood,
Unformed and undefined by the hard edges of the world beyond,
When the thrum of that drum was the sky to possibility,
When one heart formed my own with the first song humanity did sing,
The one song that began at the first beat of the first heart and taught every one since.
Every pulse a promise, of life, of beginnings, of a journey just begun,
Of a history’s origin so far from the chapter we write,
That steady echo a guide on how to keep the story going,
One beat, one breath, at a time.
.
But the world changed the notes of that song.
.
In a flash of wildfire sickness, I felt my own fall,
Felt that tireless organ stumble and clench,
A quiet hand drawn close to steal all breath within my chest.
The red streams of life put to sudden still pause.
A moment Time forgot to move for one soul,
The ticking hand shudder and still in the waiting,
For the heart to remember its own music,
Wondering if it would begin again,
Or if it had lost its song.
A taste of the days when stillness will replace the music of living,
It’s steady pace skipped, repeated, paused,
.
A record with a scratch I did not make but exists all the same.
.
I held one small heart in my hand,
Felt it hammer an unnatural pattern in one I loved,
A life so small, yet so big I could not imagine my own without her sound,
The light never faltered even as the notes changed,
Each fluttering beat a threat of the final silent song,
Calling forth the stilled rhythm of endings drawn too near.
Listened with knowing that the next note could not be promised,
Held her as tight as the fist hooked through my ribs,
Bones aching at the edge of a silence that would not be mine,
But mine to forever carry in the hollows of a heart no longer whole.
.
For I gave a piece to her and she carried it with her to the stars.
.
Such a small thing to stand between the here and the gone,
Faulted flesh behind a shield of striped bone,
Tapping out its promises with electric fingers against blood covered bone.
Never knowing when it will release its final hymn,
When it will forget its song.
Such a strange thing that all you hold dear is carried by one cadence,
For years it holds alight the lives around you and bellows the flame of your own,
Until one day you wake and that song grown quiet with familiarity in your ears,
Is suddenly heard, and to you made itself aware again as it was when it was still new.
The words haven’t changed, or perhaps they have,
Yet it no longer sounds the same.
.
For you, the notes have changed.
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Grief is so painful that it cuts you open and exposes the most vulnerable part of our being 🥹
I know this pain a little too well