Who Placed These Stars in My Chest?
Who slipped this soul into my bones,
tender, tidal, trembling
with the ache of beauty?

Did someone long before me
cup wonder in their palms like spring water
and pass it forward, breath by breath,
into the bloodline?

Was it you,
grandmother of wind-scattered seeds,
who wept when the moon rose
too perfectly
above the wheat?

Did your voice waver
at the hush of snowfall,
or did you go still,
just to hear the frost
telling stories on the windowsill?

Who taught my heart
to kneel before a lone tree at dusk,
as if it were both prayer
and grace?

Who loved this hunger into me,
not for wealth,
not for praise,
but for the pristine quiet between words,
for that one breath
when a bird pauses mid-flight
and the world forgets itself?

Was it you,
unknown grandfather,
who shaped the world with quiet hands,
finding joy
in the grain of wood,
in the rhythm of work,
in your child’s laughter
sweet with summer berries?

Did you cradle the ordinary
until it glowed?

Tell me…
who gifted me this ache
to feel everything...
to flinch at cruelty,
to rejoice when moss
claims a forgotten bench
and calls it home?

Was it your tears,
great-great grandmother,
pressed into the soil
with each planting,
that now bloom in me
as reverence?

Did someone long ago
dance with silence
until silence became a friend,
so that now
I waltz with quiet
like a beloved?

Did you kneel in prayer,
or lean your forehead
against the bark of an old elm
and call that enough?

I do not know your names.
But I feel you...
in the hush before morning,
in the breath I hold
when the world turns golden.

Maybe that’s what you left me,
not answers,
but a way of seeing,
a way of kneeling
before what others walk past.

I move through this life
not searching,
but noticing,
the way meaning lingers
in the curve of a feather,
a fallen leaf,
the way a stone fits in my palm
as if it remembers being held.

And when I lose my way,
when I forget what matters,
I breathe into the quiet
and feel them...
these stars in my chest,
still glowing,
still pointing me home.