Knowledge Burns Within

What the Fire Knows

I have held silence like a living thing,

felt its pulse beneath my ribs,

watched it grow teeth in the dark hours

when even the moon refused to speak.

There is a language in the space between words,

a grammar of breath and hesitation,

where meaning does not arrive but emerges,

slow as light through winter windows,

patient as roots that crack the stone.

I learned this language from the ash of things

I could not save—letters I burned,

names I swallowed, the small deaths

that accumulate like dust on shelves

no one cleans anymore. Each one

a syllable, each syllable a door

opening onto rooms I have never entered

but know by heart.

The fire I tend does not ask for wood.

It asks for attention, for the long gaze

that sees without consuming.

It asks for the willingness to sit

in the company of what is ending

and call it holy.

Watch how the flame teaches itself to bend:

not toward the light, not toward the dark,

but toward the shape of its own becoming,

a curve that answers nothing but the wind

that carries it. This is what I want—

to be so fully what I am that even

the passing of time cannot find purchase,

cannot claim me as its own.

The clock in the hall has stopped again.

I have stopped winding it. There is a freedom

in letting time become a river you no longer

try to navigate, a freedom in watching

the water move without asking where.

I am learning this freedom slowly,

the way one learns a difficult piece of music—

note by note, phrase by phrase,

until the body remembers what the mind

could never hold.

I remember a moment when I understood

that beauty is not what we make

but what we witness. I was standing

in a field of wild mustard, the flowers

so yellow they seemed to burn,

and I felt myself become a part

of their burning, a thread of smoke

rising from the same fire.

That moment has not ended.

It continues in everything I write,

in every line that tries to hold

what cannot be held, in every word

that points toward what has no name.

The mustard flowers are gone now.

But their fire remains, a small sun

living in the marrow of my bones,

teaching me to burn without being consumed,

to be consumed and call it living.

The page before me is empty.

It has always been empty. And yet

I fill it with the only thing I own—

the certainty that something is passing

and that I am here to witness it.

Not to capture it, not to preserve it,

but to stand in its presence and say:

I see you. I see you. I see you.

This is the poem I have been writing

since I first learned to speak.

It has no beginning and no end,

only the middle, the long middle,

where everything that matters happens

in the space between one breath and the next.

I offer it now, not as a gift

but as an acknowledgment—

that we are all fires in various stages

of burning, all lights in various stages

of dimming, all words in various stages

of becoming silence. And that this,

this trembling presence, this moment

when the flame meets the wind and does not

flinch—this is enough.

This is everything.