The Ballad of the Grain and the Drop
Impossible loves are still love; often more epic because of the impossibility.
Hear me, you who walk the shores,
for I am older than your kingdoms,
older than the bones of the earth beneath you.
Once, I was a mountain.
The world bowed to my mass,
my grandeur,
my unyielding throne above the clouds.
The sun crowned me each morning,
the wind carried my voice
across valleys,
and the seas themselves seemed small
beneath my gaze.
Then came the season of rain.
From the heavens fell she—
a single drop of water,
clear as truth,
soft as mercy.
She kissed my stone skin,
and I, who had never bent
to storm or frost,
shuddered.
“Do not go,” I pleaded.
“I think I love you.”
But she,
smiling like the moon
in a still pond,
whispered:
“I cannot stay.
The cycle calls me home
to the great sea.
But I will return—
and you must wait.”
And so I waited.
A thousand years turned
in the palm of time.
Then another.
And another still.
Each age she came to me again—
brief as a dream,
fierce as lightning.
She woke the green upon my slopes,
cut laughter through my cracks,
and left me richer
than she had found me.
Then came the last meeting.
She fell upon me with such longing
that my ancient throne trembled,
and I was torn
from my lofty keep.
Down I fell—
stone to boulder,
boulder to cobble,
cobble to sand—
into her eternal kingdom, the sea.
There she held me not in fleeting touches
but in endless embrace.
Her arms moved with the moon’s command,
her voice roared and whispered in my ears,
and I was never still.
Yet each caress
wore me away.
I became smaller,
rounder,
less than I had been.
Until the day came
when she,
spent of her passion for me,
cast me upon a strange shore—
no longer a king
but a speck
among countless brothers and sisters.
And there,
when I had nothing left to give
and nothing left to lose,
she came again.
She loved me still.
Though I was but
a single grain of sand,
I was hers,
as I had been
from the first drop.
Oath of the Grain
I will never shadow your doorway unbidden.
I will give you all the room the world can offer—
and if that is not enough,
I will step beyond it
to give you more.
I will love you
for every breath this life grants me—
and for every breath
in the life after.
#essay #memoir #journal #osxs #100daystooffset #writing #poetry
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Thank you for coming here and walking through the garden of my mind. No day is as brilliant in its moment as it is gilded in memory. Embrace your experience and relish gorgeous recollection.
Into every life a little light will shine. Thank you for being my luminance in whatever capacity you may. Shine on, you brilliant souls!
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