An Unsent Tenderness

I do not know if these lines will ever meet your gaze,

But some feelings insist on form,

Even if their destination remains unnamed.

There was something, gentle, unbidden,

That moved within me at your presence,

A filament of memory, maternal in hue,

Tethering the now to a past once cradled,

Not to possess, nor to define,

But to honour the echo of something beloved and vanished.

If ever my words unsettled,

Know they arose not from need,

But from a quiet place of care,

Neither claim, nor call,

Only the soft architecture of connection.

I have learned to hold absence as one holds breath in the dark,

Not in fear,

But in trust that space, too, is a kind of dialogue.

And should you return,

Not by compulsion,

But by your own unfolding,

You will find the warmth here intact,

Though hope may have grown quieter in its waiting.

Until then,

May gentleness find you,

As yours once found me,

Reminding me that tenderness is not extinct in the places

I thought it had long departed.