From winter’s bite to summer’s flame,
I crossed the earth to feel this sky,
Leaving a name I cannot claim,
A garden buried in goodbye.
The moorlands reach still for my bones,
Their damp is lost beneath this dust,
I wear my age like weathered stones,
Carnelian fire, now turned to rust.
The gods I knew have lost their claim,
Their temples scattered in my mind;
New spirits call me by my name,
Yet speak in tongues I cannot find.
They tell the same old cosmic tale
Of ash and birth, of fire and grief
But whisper it through hidden hail,
And leave my heart without relief.
The stars are beasts I’ve never seen,
Their ancient faces rearranged
With myths rewritten and stripped clean,
Old constellations lost or changed.
The feasts I kept are out of place
Spring hymns now fall in autumn’s hand,
I raise my cup with aching grace
For seasons I can’t understand.
And in these rites I stand alone,
A pilgrim dressed in borrowed days,
Still hearing echoes of the stone
Where once I knelt in older ways.
I thought I knew the world as true,
But now I see the cracks and seams,
Where memory’s lies are born anew,
And nothing’s ever what it seems.
I hold the ghosts I cannot touch,
I walk the roads that crack too soon.
Yet still I reach for what I’ve lost,
A home turned over with the moon.
Thorn and Benediction 
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