The Dark Beneath the Loam

There comes a season when the soul bends low,
where even the crows fall silent,
and the wind forgets its name.
Here, in the long hush between heartbeats,
I begin the descent…
through the despair,
and into the roots of it.

Shadow is not the enemy.
It is the Old One who waits
in the hollow of the ribs,
whispering, “Come see what you have buried.”
And I go… trembling,
hands stained with the ink of my own undoing.
There is no light here,
only the darkest blue pulse of becoming.

I meet the selves I’ve cast away…
the weeper, the furious child,
the one who could not bear to stay.
They do not accuse me.
They hold out their hands,
and together we make an altar
of our grief.

The earth receives what I cannot hold.
She takes my grief, my brittle faith,
and folds them into her black embrace.
Even the worms sing a psalm
for the dying I must do to live again.

In this silence, the ancestors appear.
Not as ghosts,
but as a tide of memory and bone.
They stand behind me in the mirror’s dark,
reminding me that I am both soil and seed,
both wound and healing.

When I rise,
I am not delivered from the dark,
I am the one who carries it...
a quiet companion stitched into my ribs.
For now, the night yields its weight,
the mirror that knows my face.

Autumn does not end; it circles,
and I with it…
ever dying, ever becoming,
ever held in the black wing of the world.