The Weight of What We Carry #poetry

Grandmother spoke—
and when she spoke, the air itself bowed,
as if the earth remembered her voice
before I was born,
before even her bones were woven into time.

She said:

It is not your back that hurts, child,
but the weight you carry.

And I thought she spoke of baskets,
of clay pots lifted from wells,
of firewood gathered from the forest.
But the years taught me:
what bends the spine is not wood, not stone,
but memory.
The promises kept too long,
the silences stored in shadows,
the grief that insists on being a companion
long after its season.

You, too, have felt it.
Yes, you who read these words with tired shoulders.
Your pain is not posture,
not age,
not accident—
it is the invisible load you never dared to set down.


---

And then she said:

It is not your eyes that ache,
but the injustice you are forced to see.

And her words fell like salt on an open wound.
Because what blinds us is not dust nor smoke,
but cruelty itself—
the sight of a hungry child searching in trash,
the spectacle of power dressed in gold
while kindness wears rags,
the breaking of trust in someone’s glance.

Tell me, traveler:
do your eyes burn at night?
Do you wash them with water?
Ah, but it is not water that can cleanse them.
Only justice,
only love,
only a world healed of its own indifference.


---

She leaned closer,
as if speaking to the bone inside my skull:

It is not your head that hurts,
but the thoughts you keep inside.

And is it not true?
The skull is a cavern echoing with storms.
You lock your questions in iron cages,
you silence your truths,
you swallow the unsaid
until your temples thunder with the weight.

You call it a headache,
but it is the crowd of words
knocking on the door of your tongue.
And when the door does not open,
the walls begin to crack.


---

Her voice moved down my spine,
to the throat where breath falters:

It is not your neck that aches,
but what you cannot say.

Oh, the words strangled in the passage!
Oh, the confessions that turn to stones!
You bow your head to the world,
you nod when you mean no,
you smile when you mean fire.
The neck stiffens, not from pillows or drafts,
but from the weight of unsung truths.

Your body knows what your lips deny.
The ache is only the echo of withheld speech.


---

She touched her hand to her belly,
and her voice was almost a prayer:

It is not your stomach that hurts,
but what your soul cannot digest.

Yes.
How many meals have you eaten,
yet felt emptier after?
How many days did you swallow betrayal,
call it endurance,
call it maturity?
But the body cannot be deceived.
It churns the bitterness,
it burns with the poison of falsehood.

You think it is food.
But no—
it is the indigestible weight of what you were never meant to carry.


---

And then she spoke of fire:

It is not your liver that aches,
but the anger you hold within.

Have you not felt it?
The slow burn in the blood,
the restless storm beneath the ribs?
The anger that has no river,
so it carves secret channels through flesh.
The liver becomes its prison.
You do not scream,
you do not roar,
and so the flame eats you from within.

Release it, child.
Release it into the sky, into the sea,
into the patient earth.
Do not let it calcify inside your veins.


---

Finally, her voice trembled with something deeper than sorrow,
deeper than truth:

It is not your heart that hurts,
but the absence of love.

And the room fell silent.
Even the air forgot to move.
Even the shadows leaned in closer.

Because this was the marrow of her wisdom.
The heart does not bleed from illness alone.
It bleeds from vacancy,
from the hollow where tenderness should live.
It bleeds from the silence of those who should have stayed,
from the departure of hands that once promised return.
It bleeds not from beating,
but from yearning.


---

And so she said:

Remember—
love is the most powerful medicine.
Do not wound yourself with your own hands.
Do not plant daggers in your own body.
Heal yourself, my soul,
with the very thing you withhold:
love.


---

But hear me now, you who walk this earth:
Her words were not for me alone.
They are for you.
They are for all who bend beneath invisible weights.

I speak to you as if to myself.
We are mirrors,
reflecting each other’s hidden tremors.
When your back bends,
mine shudders.
When my eyes blur,
yours ache.
We are not separate—
we are fragments of the same soul
remembering itself through pain.

So when I urge you to lay down the weight,
know that I, too, am learning to unclench my hands.
When I urge you to speak,
know that my own throat is raw with swallowed storms.
When I ask you to love,
it is because I am still learning how to open
the locked door of my own chest.


---

And just when I believe she has gone—
she enters again.

Not as memory,
not as dream,
but as presence.
Her footsteps are not sound but rhythm.
Her breath is not air but prayer.
She comes clothed in the fabric of time itself,
woven with threads of the ones who came before her.

And she sits.
No throne, no altar, no crown.
Only stillness.
And the stillness is greater than thunder.

She lays her hand—
on my head,
on your head,
on every head that has bent under unseen weight.

And she speaks,
and her words do not fall,
they rise,
they blaze,
they circle like constellations around us:

Love is the river that softens every stone.
Love is the thread that binds every wound.
Love is the fire that does not consume,
but illumines.
Love is the weight lifted from your back,
the light restored to your eyes,
the silence broken in your throat.
Love is the medicine your own hands forgot to make.
Love is the healer that was always inside you,
waiting to be called by name.


---

And then, the third arrives.
Not she, not I, not you,
but the One beyond.

Call it God.
Call it Spirit.
Call it the Ancestor who walks unseen.
It does not matter.
The Third comes when love is spoken,
when the circle is unbroken.

And in that presence,
all our aches dissolve.
The back remembers how to stand.
The eyes remember how to see.
The head remembers silence as a friend.
The throat remembers song.
The stomach remembers sweetness.
The liver remembers cool waters.
And the heart—
oh, the heart remembers love,
as if it had never forgotten.


---

And so I end where she began:

Do not wound yourself with your own hands.
Do not mistake the body for the pain.
The body is only the map.
The soul is the traveler.

And love—
love is the only destination,
and the only cure.

#PoetryOfHealing #SpiritualPoetry #RumiInspired #LoveIsMedicine #SoulAndBody #AncestralWisdom #MindBodySpirit #LongPoem #SacredWords