but I’m holding on to Your endless love
through all the foggy days,
through all the tears I’ve prayed
and I’m breaking through
for one touch from You
and I’m not afraid

-Holding On by Strahan

for you,
right now is the last
place you want to call home.

you feel the strain of separation,
doubt threading its way through
your daily movements,
fissures through still-painful
wounds, fingers that once
held a Father’s hand now
crumpled into a fist against the
carpet where you lie and
ask why you have been
so long forsaken.

you never learned how to feel
the weight of your wandering soul
and not resist –
not recoil as faith groans under
a shattered sky emptied of longing
for tomorrow’s sunrise,
not push back from weary days,
melancholy sameness that pulls
the blanket over tear-stained eyes,
begging to see no more.

you wait and wait,
but not patiently –
and every day marks an etch upon
the wall of cold stone
quickly becoming a tomb.
you smile for strangers, but grieve
that the reflection is false,
crumple as silence ravishes
you and leaves you aching for the
end of the world.

wait, beloved, and see.
let patient longings
mold your stubborn
certainties, stir
up the realness
that echoes through
mundane distractions and
carries you toward
mercies reaching
from the end of
days