elfin whale
The ember burned beside my empty bed.
I’d grown too tired to honor such a spark.
It begged for awe; I turned my face instead
and let the deeper dark reclaim my heart.
When waking came, a bruise of color spread
a wound that bled through heaven’s formless cloth.
From that thin breach, possibility
spilled out like whispers freed from any god.
New tales arose like heresies in dust;
they flared, they failed, they mimicked sacred light.
Yet nature, masked in ever-shifting forms,
kept asking mortals to mistake it right.
The first to speak said only what he could
a truth so small it barely touched the void.
I watched the older beasts ascend to kin
and carve their lineage out of need and noise.
The youth, made naked by adversity,
looked up and named the hollow heavens “Just.”
He called the vacant sky his only “Lord.”
I let him keep that lie-it was his crutch.
For through his faith, however frail or wrong,
my own profane existence learned its song.
proven fern