Lemon Dreams

Rati Saxena, ed. by Kate Rogers and Viki Holmes, from Not a Muse: The Inner Lives of Women: A World Poetry Anthology; "Mountain nights"

Pain is a quiet thing.

It doesn’t always arrive with thunder

or announce itself loudly.

It moves in slowly

through late night calls,

through promises spoken softly

like they might last forever.

It lives in the way

two people begin to orbit each other,

drawn close by something

neither of them fully understands.

There are moments

that felt like home.

Your laughter against my chest.

Your voice when the world had gone quiet.

The way your eyes softened

when you forgot to guard yourself.

Those moments were real.

I know they were.

But pain is strange like that.

It hides inside beauty.

Inside stolen time

and whispered devotion.

Inside the kind of love

that exists just beyond the edge

of ordinary life.

Pain is realizing

that what felt eternal

was only temporary.

That someone can hold your heart

with both hands

and still find a way

to set it down.

Not always out of cruelty.

Perhaps not even out of hatred.

Just because their path

continued somewhere

They didn't want you follow.

And so pain remains

not loud,

not violent.

Just a quiet echo

of everything that once

Felt like forever - Bewtweenthelines-ny