I Will Wait For You

To love someone from the margins of their life, a devotion that endures in silence until it becomes myth.

I have taken root in the scorched earth
outside the mouth of the underworld.
Ash clings to me like a second skin;
I smell of burnt laurel,
a patience that outlives bone.

I will wait for you.

The gods have stopped speaking.
They turned their eyes away,
sickened by a man who refuses to move,
who feeds on the shadow of a woman
who does not look back.
I no longer pray,
I breathe your name
as ash.

I will wait for you.

Persephone watches me with pity,
offers me the brittle petals
of her underworld flowers.
They crumble in my hands.
She knows what waiting becomes:
a slow rot, a tender ruin,
the mind consumes itself,
a trapped animal gnawing its own limb.

Still, I will wait for you.

I wait for the one I guarded in silence.
I kept your silhouette in sight
as you moved through the night’s cold breath,
my steps a quiet guard behind yours.

I will wait for you.

The Fates unwind my life
into a single, fraying thread.
They tell me I am already dead,
that this is how the dead behave,
standing in the threshold,
caught between one heartbeat
and the next.
But I refuse their shears.

I will wait for you.

Even the river forgets my name.
Its waters drag at my ankles,
urging me to step in,
to surrender the vigil,
to drown quietly where no one
will witness
A man unravelling.
But I will not move.

I will wait for you
until the sky folds itself shut,
until the last star has collapsed
within its own cold light.
And if years roll by
And your face remains the myth
I carved from loneliness.
and if they jeer and call it madness,
I will stay silent.
I will not move.
I will wait for you.

Anxiously waiting by Josef Israels