You fit in my heart like a small hidden bird,
All hush-feathered wonder, more tremble than word,
As though you had flown through the bones of my frame,
And built something bright out of breath and of vein.
You settled where slow, quiet heartbeats begin,
In the red velvet dark folded under my skin,
Where the pulse keeps a rhythm both fragile and deep,
Like a secret the body is trying to keep.
I did not invite you, you simply were there,
A flicker of wings in the stillness of air,
A warmth in the hollow I had carefully grown,
A light in the place I had thought was just bone.
And oh, how I learned the soft weight of your song,
How it threaded my breathing and carried along,
Through mornings of silver and evenings of blue,
Till loving felt less like a choice, and more true.
But birds are made mostly of sky and height,
Of distance that glimmers in pale early light,
And sometimes I feel, in the curve of my chest,
The shift of a wing reconsidering rest.
Are these ribs a shelter, a circle, a seam,
Where you pause for a while like a half-finished dream?
Or are they thin bars I never meant to design,
Forged out of wanting you safely as mine?
For love is a blackbird that sings after dusk,
All velvet-throat music and midnight-soft musk,
It circles the quiet where daylight has been,
Then settles like shadow drawn close to the skin.
I never would clip what was born for the breeze,
Nor barter your sky for my own small ease,
Nor anchor your wings to the weight of my name,
Nor darken your flight with the shadow of claim.
If ever your feathers grow restless for air,
If wide-open heavens call louder than care,
I hope I remember that loving is this:
Not tightening fingers, but loosening wrists.
And if you stay folded in heartbeat and bone,
not tethered by fear, not held as my own,
then let it be a choice, quiet, steady and blessed,
Not bars of a cage, but the shape of a nest.
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