It began with the lamps
forgetting to shine.
Their light folded inward,
Wings in sleeping pose
Streets loosened their seams,
stones cooling beneath absence.
The river lost its way,
turned inward,
dreaming of seas unseen.
Houses sighed once,
then drew the night
around their shoulders.
Curtains dreamed of faces,
porch steps of laughter,
a cradle left swinging.
Empty.
The clock’s hands
rested against each other.
Time held its breath.
No one was gone
only the town
remembering a heartbeat
that never echoed
outside the womb.
And in that stillness,
a single fire trembled,
as if trying to ignite
someone it loved.
Then it, too,
closed its eyes.
The town drifted down,
window by window,
door by door,
until all that remained
was the sound
of sleeping brick,
and a river’s slow forgetting
circling into silence.
Thorn and Benediction 
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