POETRY | Wild Things

I pull the grey fleece around me,

having lost count in the night, of the days.

How long I've lain in wait

to hear again the growl of my own storm,

unapologetic in my unravelling

as storms are born to do.

How do I tell you what it is to pray

asking to be a burst of lightning

in the sky of my own life.

The days are cold,

as when we first met,

only now I stand

bold and wet in the sheeting rain

of all the loves that broke me open.

My arms grow strong

now,

in a way they were not, before us.

It does not change that my hand still reaches.

But no wise heart is without fear and

I’m learning

a scar can make you grateful

if you will sit at the feet

of all it can teach.

Long have I wept for where I used to be soft;

lamented these bones

and the waft of breath across

storybook skin I loved.

Until one day, running

headlong at the same cliff edge,

I found I did not fall

but rose and swept.

Hard and banking

I thundered, unfinished with being bereft,

down my own mountainsides;

barrelled wild and grey

through valley and wood,

from the familiar, misted height called life.

For the first time

I think I understood what water must feel

when the sky takes it back.

We're all just droplets, intimately made to return.

And I carry them still,

in the land of me:

The tears that burned.

But see, I am becoming green again.

A green I earned.

The days lengthen with grace.

I carry the birds underwing

as they fly back to my crags,

midnight feathers dropping

into place,

morsels of hope and who I used to be,

they flutter into the nest of me.

I breathe.

Nothing is here is finished.

None is what it was,

while the page of tomorrow billows

at the window sill,

unwritten, uncertain, unbroken still.

And yet

the wild things have come again

to make home

between the shadows and scars of all that is done.

Next season, I think,

let there be flowers to call back

the bees

and the honey,

and sun.

                                      © Erin Brown 2025