It's Still Life

The Liturgy for the Unbound Heart

I. The Colour of Softened Truth

It begins where blush meets ash,
a muted rose,
pressed between pages of memory,
tinged with the softness of smoke after rain.
Not pink, not grey,
but something woven of both,
a tenderness wrapped in quiet release,
the hue of truth
whispered after years of silence,
the moment sorrow exhales
and becomes something softer.

II. The Nature of the Glyph

Hesitant, warm, humbly luminous.
It blooms only in the presence of honesty
and dims when avoidance returns.
It does not shout its grace,
it breathes it,
a slow unfurling in the hollow
where shame once knotted the ribs.

III. The Elemental

It is smoke softened by blossom,
air carrying the warmth of ember
and the memory of bloom.
This is the alchemy of Ashen Rose:
not fire, not petal,
a quiet reconciliation of both.
A heart learning to hold its own ashes
without forgetting
it was once a garden.

IV. The Tag and Its Invocation

When inked into thread,
when traced along the edge of a wound,
it calls not to others,
but to itself:
Release what you have carried.
Unknot what you have bound.
Let compassion return to your hands.
It does not reconcile lovers,
it reconciles the soul
to its own skin.

V. The Crow’s Witness

He watches from the edge of the page,
still as a breath held:
“Even crows understand
some nests are not built of twigs,
but of sorrows we no longer need to carry.
Ashen Rose is the colour
of letting them fall.”
Ashen Rose is the colour of a soul
unbraiding its own silence.