I Married While My Heart Was Sleeping

2019

I married while my heart was sleeping

But one day it awoke.

These feelings from my childhood, lost,

Rushed back | to meet their host.

The red of youth that flowed so wildly—

With aging dead, I had assumed—

Started once more to sprout from the ground

Of my heart where once it bloomed.

Excited, sure—but worried still |

how this awakening would show,

Or what it would say, how it would act

Through a body, now committed, and vowed.

Its slumbering spirit had changed not a bit,

But over its comatose years

I’d lived through the loom, moved past and assumed

My heart to be scarred and re-seared.

Acceptance, I’d already come to befriend,

And I found content in my dreams

And stories, and poems I’d written while living

In a lifetime before, so it seemed.

But once it re-knocked and reopened the door

Without being given a key,

The feeling that used to be one of my proudest

Existing now terrified me.

I hope, still now, we’ll learn to be cordial

Or perhaps, better yet, we’ll resume;

But he’ll have to study

And I’ll have to trust him

To bloom vines around something new.