MY PRIDE

Where the Heart Learns to Stay

You come back every time I close my eyes as if ten years have not erased your name. We walk the hill, your children at our side. A loose stone falls and echoes just the same. It looks like you but something is not right. The mountain light has twisted what I knew. A stranger wears your face beneath the sky, and yet it breathes the way you used to do. They speak to me now kindly since I left and have no voice to answer back with truth. I know I never held the common touch. I carry that, but I am done with youth. You laugh and say my pride was always large. I wrote to save the world and heal the weak. But life just bent me till I understood that art is what consoles the one who seeks. I told you still I drift in darker moods, not mad enough to match the ones who burn. You said that vision counts and depth of heart, and quality is what we wait to learn. Can great work rise from such a narrow room? I am no angel, never wrote like one. You said my flaws were still alive with fire, and at least I never stole from anyone. Your voice dropped low with something like regret. You stood there in the ordinary light. I lost the sharp remark you made that day about your vanities all out of sight.