Heartwood

Somewhere today a hand still steadies a hand:

the small one learning the road,

the wobble caught before the fall,

the low voice behind it…go on, I have you.

All day the phones fill with love,

the easy word, the laid table,

laughter shaped around a man

still here, beloved, and loved out loud.

Let them have it. Let it be loud.

There is no grief in another’s joy,

only the proof the thing is real,

that some are held, and know it.

But not every hand today finds another.

Some reach for a steadiness

gone into the ground, or thinned to weather,

and carry now the heartwood of a tree

that held them once and stands no more:

dead at the centre, growing nothing,

holding the whole green crown upright still.

And some reach out and find no wood at all,

who never knew the weight of being carried,

who grieve a thing they cannot picture:

only the hollow, the exact size of a father.

Hear this, if the day says little to you:

there is no shame in the space.

A hollow is not nothing.

It is the shape a presence leaves,

or the shape one should have left

and never did. Either way, it is real,

and it is yours, and you may name it.

So let the oak say what the day will not:

that what we are held by

we do not always keep,

that the hand that steadied yours

and the hand that never came

leave the same mark in the grain.

You were always held;

if not by the hand you longed for,

then by the ground that stays,

the oak still standing,

the old green patience that fathers us all.