Counting Light

Holding sorrow and sweetness in the same breath

Photo by Thomas Kinto on Unsplash

I wake to sirens braided with birdsong, read the headlines while my coffee cools beside me, let the names of the dead rest briefly in my chest before the day demands motion again—starting the snowblower before the first storm, refilling the bird feeder for the third time this week, bracing for that sudden heaviness that arrives without warning and moves through the body the way weather does, intimate and unavoidable, and still the sun keeps finding the floor no matter what unfolded overnight, and I think about how fear travels fast but love moves differently, heavier, slower, how it stays, how even now someone is laughing in a kitchen, someone is learning a new word, someone presses seeds into soil without promise, trusting rain, counting light, and I carry it all like a second heart, sorrow and sweetness knocking together until they become a current, a charge, a decision to open my hands, to remain, to keep my face turned toward the dawn, a simple way of saying yes in a world that asks everything.

First published in Nixes Mate Review

---

Some days, my mind is calm enough that I can sort through my thoughts and lay them out in neat stanzas. Other days, not so much, especially when I’m holding conflicting thoughts at the same time. Trying to pin one down feels a bit like catching a moth flickering around a porch light. Just when you think you’ve got it, it slips away.

That’s partly why I’ve been drawn to prose poems lately. Instead of forcing my thoughts into orderly lines, I’ve been trying to let them move the way they naturally do, one observation leading to another, one feeling brushing against the next, all in a single, unbroken breath.

I wrote “Counting Light” during one of those seasons when everything seemed connected. Headlines, chores, memories, grief, gratitude, and small moments of beauty all occupied the same space in my mind. Rather than trying to separate them, I followed the current. The poem resisted line breaks and periods, asking to remain one long sentence, as though it needed to be spoken before the breath ran out.

The more I work with prose poems, the more I realize they mirror the way I experience the world. We don’t live our lives in tidy stanzas. We carry everything at once, and somehow keep moving.

---

As always, a huge THANK YOU for taking the time to read my poem. Without you, my voice would be a whisper just floating in the air.

---