The Seed in the Spine

A pinecone grew where silence slept,

tucked in the cradle of my mind,

not buried, but waiting,

its scales sealed with ancient breath.

Beneath it, a ladder unfurled,

thirty-three rungs of forgetting,

each one humming with the weight

of things I once believed I was.

I climbed with trembling hands,

the soles of my feet kissed by flame.

Not fire that scars,

but the kind that sings open locked doors.

At the seventh step, I wept.

At the twelfth, I remembered.

At the twenty-first, I forgave the mirror.

And at the thirty-third, I bloomed.

The pinecone cracked, not loudly,

but with the sound of starlight breaking water,

and inside it, light. Not blinding,

but familiar. A home I forgot was mine.

It poured down like oil,

anointing every cell, every grief,

every “not enough” I ever swallowed.

And I saw.

I was never climbing.

I was remembering how to rise.