Loved Like A Promise Etched in Stone

I came from many roads.

From sugar fields split by grief,

from red hills that bled

when the deer ran dry,

from mothers who sang to rivers

and men who carved silence into stone.

My name is long,

threaded through borders

carried on ships,

breathed into clay,

hidden in rooms where no one dared speak it aloud.

And you...

you came from high places.

Not rich, but ridged.

Hill-born.

Sea-marked.

A man who knew how to still the air

just by standing in it.

We met where the land ends

and the loch begins

where mist curls like memory

and the sky touches water

without asking permission.

You didn’t ask for mine either.

You just knew

the way moss knows the stone it clings to,

the way old trees recognize the ones

who’ve held axes

but never used them.

I didn’t come to Scotland for love.

I came for breath.

For the wind that does not lie,

and the earth that does not care

who your father was.

But there you were,

cut from the hills

like every poem I never wrote.

You spoke Latin like a secret

pressed between ribs

not aloud,

but in the way you looked at me

like truth was enough.

Like success wasn’t conquest,

but holding on

to something that might vanish.

You touched my hand like it was already fading,

and held it anyway.

I was not soft.

I was storm-fed.

Swamp-born.

Built of ashes and lawless maps.

I had learned

to love quietly

so it couldn’t be taken.

To name things only in silence

so no one could unname them.

But you...

you loved like a promise

etched in stone so deep

even weather forgot how to erase it.

You saw every nation in me.

You did not flinch.

You kissed the scar

where my name used to burn.

You called it beautiful.

And the land approved.

Still, we were not made for always.

Time is cruel to those

who speak in centuries.

We lost each other

not in war,

but in the folding of life.

The tide came.

So did duty.

And so we let go.

But the wind...

the wind remembers us.

It still speaks your name

when the heather sighs.

And mine?

It lingers in the salt

just below the stones.

Sometimes I dream

we walk again..

no clocks,

no shame,

just boots on dirt

and your laugh

cutting through the grey.

And in the dream,

we do not need to explain

why we belong.

You look at me.

I look back.

And that’s enough.

Truth conquers.

Hope is fed by return.

And the land..

the land keeps the place

where our names

still wait.