Poem: The hand that doesn’t leave!

By Arian Galdini

On nights when light, worn out, slides down the wall and can’t find where to stay,

you’re left with a heart working inside you,

a clock hand on a blank dial,

and air, even when it enters, comes like debt.

Then something simple happens, merciless in its own quiet,

an unseen hand holds your breath at the edge of falling,

as a child is held at a threshold, without a voice.

Loneliness, once it becomes a path, offers no ornament, no explanation.

You walk with your own shadow, sometimes a companion, sometimes a guard,

and each step narrows the place where language can live.

On that path, nearness doesn’t come as a cry,

it comes, and knows tears’ language before you have words.

Near it, darkness loses the right to call itself an end.

When friends turn into walls,

when smiles become closed doors,

when you’re put outside like a spare object, with a small price that can’t protect you,

coldness sells.

At the inner table, bread appears.

Water stays.

When the world overturns inside you, not with noise, but with a slow slide,

when every plan becomes torn lining and won’t hold to any needle,

when every bolt turns you back without meeting your eyes,

you stay, without ceremony, like someone who has nowhere to go but into breath.

The stone in your pocket changes place.

Minutes pass, and it comes into your palm.

It rests in the light.

Then it drops onto the plank at the threshold,

without a sound.

When you live with honor and faith with no show,

when you love the good with the care of someone who won’t wake a sleeping child,

and still they avoid you, leave you outside,

even those who speak of light naming you darkness,

then it isn’t only refusal that hurts, it’s erasure,

they wipe you from the glass.

And yet, inside you, another measure is set down,

not to make you visible,

but to keep you true.

In the hour they deny you as if you’d never been,

when your name becomes a whisper and then becomes nothing,

you feel in your fingers a small warmth, unseen,

an ember stirs in your palm, how, no one knows.

A colorless cloak holds your back, not to hide you,

but to hold you up.

You may remain the loneliest of the lonely,

without being abandoned.

There are moments when your hand goes “almost,”

and that “almost” is sharper than a nail on wood.

Quiet.

Your hand comes close to the plank, to the line where fatigue confuses ending with rescue.

The nail touches the wood.

A mark.

And there the stopping happens,

not from fear of eyes,

but from a memory deeper than words.

The fist opens.

And the latch, cold, does not click.

Sweat falls with no witness,

silence.

Fear stays without a voice.

In the lining sits the cold coin of guilt.

It won’t let you walk straight.

None of this becomes a medal.

When you fall, there is no audience.

Only a slow rising.

A person rises when no one is watching.

And then comes that morning when air feels new though the room is the same.

The curtain moves a little. Another breath.

The cup stays cold, but light touches its rim.

Hope wasn’t announced.

It was held.

Like a guard at the threshold,

like wordless company,

like loyalty that did not grow tired of waiting,

even when you grew tired of waiting for yourself.

At the end, when everything falls quiet,

when even the voices of “the righteous” turn cold and far,

you don’t need to convince anyone.

Enough that, in the dark, you do not leave your hand alone,

that small moment when your finger returns to the plank.

And at the inner table, where there is no audience,

one thing remains,

a crumb of bread on the threshold,

untouched.

Arian Galdini