SEEDS WE KEPT IN OUR PALMS

We are blue in our emptiness 

with notes struck in a room with no walls 

deep down, below the pale sky 

we flout our ways with imagination 

with weak palms cupped around nothing 

feeble eyes fixed on a horizon

we have never once walked toward.

We dream, and dream, to make more clouds 

as if a wish could carry the weight 

our  hands were built to lift.

But a cloud is only rain that forgot to fall 

and a man who only dreams

is an ember curled inside cold ashes 

waiting for a wind he refuses to let in 

warmth with nowhere to go 

mistaking its own glow for a fire.

We truly arrive into who we are

only when we let our inner muscle

free itself from the stress of looking beyond 

beyond the work, hour, and the handle 

that was given to us for exactly this:

to raise our hope like a rib cage

lifting with breath, to tally the small proofs

of our own strength. 

One done thing after another 

until we start growing green grass

in the garden we kept only imagining.

An unplanted seed owes no one an apology

for the harvest it never gave.

But you are not a seed. 

You have legs already, been given the rain.

We only start becoming natural

when we become the skill it takes to walk 

not the wish to walk or poem about walking 

but the worn, unglamorous path

that men of action once wore smooth

with the bottoms of their feet 

one deliberate, unremarkable step after another 

until the trail is no longer a metaphor 

but real with your name already halfway down it.