How to Raise Beauty

 (For the woman who blooms even in her dusk)

The first wore pink like a memory

tattered lace on a shoulder that’s held

too many seasons without soft hands.

Her petals torn, not by storm,

but by the quiet mouths of time

things that nibble at beauty

when no one is watching.

Still, she stands.

Color clinging to the curve of her ruin

like a hymn whispered by the stubborn.

A survivor’s blush

half wilted, half warning.

Not asking to be seen,

but impossible to forget.

And the second

a deep violet burn,

as if fire kissed her edge

and left behind a royal dusk.

She bends, but not in surrender

more like reverence

for the ache of her own becoming.

Wrinkled and rain-specked,

she wears her bruises like velvet,

like a woman who’s danced through grief

and now hums her name

only to the moon.

You see, these flowers do not lie.

They tell the truth of fatigue

how it crawls into bone like damp,

how even light feels heavy

after carrying yourself too long

through rooms where no one asked

how much was being asked of you.

And yet..

you bloom.

Even now,

as your colors darken

into something the world calls decay,

you glow

a different kind of radiance,

more ember than flame.

You are not less.

You are becoming

like a forest in fall,

like night blooming jasmine,

like soil that remembers

how to raise beauty

from what was broken.

Let them look at your petals

and see endings.

You know better.

You are the dusk before root.

The bruised bloom

that will seed

another wild,

feral beginning.