Sorrow’s Paradox

Like cathedral kelp in the abyssal dark,

 Ancestors drift upward through memory’s tide,

mothers beget daughters beget mothers,

their fronds reaching for light that filters through centuries of salt.

Sorrow is the ink that stains the parchment of joy, 

each ache a syllable in pleasure’s secret script.

We do not suffer to be punished.

We suffer to be written into the story that only blood can tell.

From womb to wound,

we are etched in the calligraphy of loss,

our bones the quills,

our breath the ink.

Even laughter carries the scent of ash,

a perfume distilled from yesterday’s painful fire.

No longer entrapped by agony,

we rise like cathedral kelp,

rooted in the ocean’s grave,

yet stretching toward the sun

with arms that do not know surrender.

Their green stained glass shimmering with the supplications of the drowned.

And death,

that patient tide,

draws near with velvet certainty.

We feel its hush in our marrow,

its lullaby in the slowing pulse.

But then…

 A twist in the current.

 A healing not begged for, but gifted.

Time, like a rogue wave, returns us to shore.

We wake with sand in our lungs and salt on our lips,

alive again, not because we escaped pain,

but because we sorrow as the price of joy’s return.