"I Wrote This Between Lives" I woke where time slips soft and thin, A place where endings first begin, Where silence folds its silver wings, And listens while forever sings. No dawn arrived. No evening died. No stars were born. No worlds replied. The hours had no need for names - Just the light of countless flames. A laugh, a name I almost knew, A sky of gold, a field of blue, A mother's hand, a soldier's cry - They passed as one beneath my eye. I held a promise, worn and old, More precious far than minted gold, A vow I'd whispered, life to life, Through joy and birth, through loss and strife. I watched my many faces fade, The saint, the thief, the queen, the maid. Each wore my soul a little while, Each in their own unique profile. The crowns grew dust. The scars grew light. The wrongs dissolved beneath the night. What once seemed mountains, vast and steep, Were pebbles in forever’s keep. I met the ones I'd loved before. We did not ask what names we wore. We knew each other soul by soul, As rivers know the waiting shoal. Some stayed a breath, some stayed an age. Some wrote a line upon my page. No meeting ever proved in vain; Each joy became another vein Through which compassion learned to flow, From lives forgotten long ago. For every heart I'd failed to see Returned a softening to me. The body is a borrowed room, A cradle first, and then a tomb. Yet neither wall nor flesh can bind The patient hunger of the mind. We dress ourselves in dust and skin, Step through the door, forget, begin. We call it fate. We call it chance. The cosmos simply calls it dance. So here I write where clocks don't chime, Between the quiet seams of time, Before another breath is drawn, Before another borrowed dawn. If ever these small words survive The sleep that greets each earthly life, And someone reads what I once knew, Perhaps those words were meant for you. Should something in your spirit stir - Should something breathtaking occur - Do not mistake it for a dream. You've crossed this silent, shining stream.