It's Still Life

15 of 27 Featherhung – The Poem – The Fragment: Unfinished Flight

I. The Almost-Forgiven
Not a wound, but its afterglow —
an ash-rose stain between them,
where Brigid’s silence hooks Felreil’s wing
and his ink pools flat at her feet.
They circle the unspoken,
two crows with the same bone in their beaks.

II. The Crooked Landing
A word tilts mid-air:
You knew — (but she didn’t).
You meant — (but he couldn’t).
The weight is in the almost,
a feather caught on a branch,
just out of reach.

III. The Weight of Weightless
Felreil’s quill hesitates.
Brigid’s hands forget to clench.
This is how they carry it:
not burden, but balance —
like a wing bearing sky
by refusing to name its load.

IV. The Misstep
A glance sliced too thin,
a joke that bruised instead of bloomed.
The Book records it in glyphs that itch:
Here lies the ache you couldn’t stitch shut.

V. The Kindness Stalled
She practices the words in crow-tongue,
but they stick — old ink in her throat.
Felreil listens,
counts her pulse in margins,
and does not write coward —
only waiting.

VI. The Unsaid
I should have— (she breathes).
They must have— (he scratches out).
The page yellows between them.
Neither turns it.

VII. The Feather’s Lesson
It does not fall.
It does not fly.
It hangs —
a pendulum without a clock,
a forgiveness without a name.

VIII. The Still Air
They sit in it —
this suspension.
No absolution.
No attack.
Just the hum of not yet
and the courage to leave it there.

IX. The Almost
Ash-rose: the colour of this threshold.
Not stop.
Not go.
Just pause.
Felreil paints it on her wrist.
Brigid lets it dry.

X. And So
Let it hang.
Let it ache.
Let it be the bridge
you don’t cross — yet.
Featherhung is not failure,
but the art of bearing
what hasn’t finished with you.

XI. To Be Human
is to be both the wound and the balm.
To ache.
To mend.
To forget.
To try again
with hands still sticky
from the last time’s honey.

XII. Featherhung
The colour of a wing
neither rising nor falling —
just holding the sky at bay.

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