What faltering steps we must take,
Teetering forward after being frozen in place for so long,
In stasis, prone.
How many times did your legs give way beneath you,
Protesting that they were feeble, feeble, feeble,
That this gravity of love was too much,
Leaving you falling, falling, falling?
These are not the fresh new first steps
Of a babe-in-arms newly become simply a babe,
But the torturous totter of an invalid,
Wracked by the atrophy of heart and compound fracture of soul.
You have been attended, of course, impossibly,
A cleric of solace and of bewildering loyalty,
Whose first prescription was always to stop asking
If there wasn't somewhere else they'd rather be.
They have come to you against all sense,
Come to you against all reason,
Come to you against every sharp stab from brain to heart
Insisting incessantly that they want nothing whatsoever to do with you--
--and now, finally, you come to them.
The heart is a muscle, they say,
And it is one you have not used in far too long.
Its beat is alien to you now, and so
You falter.
You fall.
Every lift of the foot is a recreation of that
Falling, falling, falling of your collapse,
Gravity taking over once more--
--but arrested, this time, by your own strength.
You shift your weight,
You look up and ahead and out of yourself,
And you take another step,
Because now, there is someone worth healing for.