By Grace
By Grace
What I mistook for forgiveness
was a door that opened into water,
and I walked through it
not drowning,
but breathing differently,
as if my lungs had learned
a language older than air.
By grace, they said,
but grace had teeth marks,
grace had worn its knees thin
from all that kneeling,
grace was a bird
that forgot how to sing
and learned instead
to hum with its bones.
The angels I expected
arrived as ordinary rain,
soft and insistent,
turning the pavement into a mirror
where I saw my face
becoming someone else's memory,
becoming fog,
becoming the space
between what I was
and what I'm turning into.
By grace,
the wound became a window.
By grace,
the window became a mouth
speaking in a dialect
I'd been hearing all my life
but never understood
until I stopped trying
to translate it
into anything
but itself.
There was a garden once,
or maybe it was a graveyard
the difference blurred
when I stopped pulling up
what wanted to grow there.
Flowers bloomed from my mistakes,
roots drinking from the water table
of everything I'd buried,
everything I thought
needed to stay
underground.
By grace,
the ghosts became guides.
By grace,
the guides became questions
with no interest
in being answered,
only in being asked
again and again
until the asking itself
became a kind of
arriving.
I found a staircase
that led both up and down
simultaneously,
and when I took the first step
I realized I'd been standing
on it all along,
that grace was not
the climb
but the standing,
not the arrival
but the being
mid-motion,
suspended between
falling and
flight.
The child I used to be
handed me a stone
and told me it was bread,
and by grace
I believed her,
and by grace
the stone softened
in my mouth,
became sustenance,
became the thing
that fed me
when I thought
I'd starve.
By grace,
the breaking wasn't ending
it was the beginning
of a different shape,
the shell cracking
not to destroy
but to release,
the chrysalis remembering
it was never meant
to be
permanent.
Time folded its hands
and stopped counting.
The past became present became future
became all three at once,
became the single moment
I'd been running from
and running toward
and finally
running through,
carried by something
I couldn't name
but could feel
like a current,
like a hand
on my back,
like a voice saying:
you don't have to understand it,
you just have to let it
carry you.
By grace,
I let go.
By grace,
the letting go
held me.
©️scry
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Hello Scry, I left you an important DM. Will you please respond when you can, hopefully very soon? It's important because it's time sensitive. Thank you so much.
Great work. It’s a poem to be read out loud. Again and again