Shifting Sands

By MissT

​The clock strikes,

and everything changes.

Tension at home turns people into strangers.

The New Year dawns, and suddenly

there are adults where my children used to be.

I reach to help,

but it’s never enough

to make them see that life is tough.

​The kitchen table holds the space

of every ghost and every face.

The echoes of the childhood years

are muffled now by grown-up fears.

I watch the door, I watch the clock,

waiting for a familiar knock,

learning that love, in its purest form,

is being the port, but not the storm.

​I can’t control the way I feel

this quiet loss feels all too real.

Love has never been easy to show.

What’s even harder is letting you go.

I keep running,

though silence is killing me,

a shell of myself where I used to be.

​I’ve spent my life as the steady hand,

drawing the lines and shifting the sand.

Now I must learn to stand quite still,

against the grain of my own will.

It’s a different strength, a quiet art,

to hold them close with a tethered heart,

trusting the roots that I once sowed

to guide them down an unknown road.

​The house is still, the air is thin,

but a second breath is moving in.

I’m more than just the ghost of “then”

I’m finding who I am again.

Yet even as the moments fray,

I know we’ll find another day.

​I won’t give up at the first decay.

If you think I’ll crumble in disarray,

think again.

It will be okay.