Beauty’s Struggle

The façade versus the authenticity of beauty.

Beauty enters softly,
like a bird alighting on a shoulder,
weightless, welcome, yet ready to startle

at any sudden truth.
Those touched by its wings feel
the hush of admiration around them,
a fragile spell that trembles
the moment they begin to wonder
why it was cast,
and how long it will hold.

Time moves…

As it always does,
quiet in its confidence,
unyielding in its pace.
Some try to bargain with it,
to smooth the lines it writes,
to gather again the glow
that slipped through their fingers
before they even noticed its warmth.

But beauty of the first kind
is a fleeting constellation,
always shifting, never still long enough to grasp.

In youth, the beautiful
walk a path swept clean by others’ eagerness,
doors opening, glances turning,

the air humming with want and wonder.
Yet beneath that brightness lies a hum of expectation,
a storm of envy and desire that can swallow the unprepared.

Wisdom arrives…

In quieter ways,
in seeing that many who shone the brightest
lived shadowed lives, where applause could,

 and cannot

 ease loneliness.
Admiration often forgets to understand.
And daughters especially learn to read the weather of gazes
before they step into the room.

But…

There is another kind of beauty,
the kind that time cannot touch,
a radiance carried in the way one listens,
the way one softens the space around them.
It is a beauty that lifts, that gathers others in its glow
without asking for anything in return.
The world leans closer not to worship, but to feel whole.
And those who possess this deeper light teach

 without speaking that true beauty

is not a face turned toward admiration,
but a heart turned toward others,
a presence that leaves everyone
a little more luminous.