A Cold Fact

At some point the struggle ended.
Not with triumph.
Simply with the recognition
that the night does not answer prayer.

Truth stood there
as mountains stand in winter,
not hostile, not kind,
only present.

And slowly I understood
that its silence was not directed at me.

The world sheds its decorations quickly.
Roses darken and collapse into themselves.
The songs of mothers fade into rooms
where no one listens anymore.

Yet something remains.

A certain beauty belonging to facts:
the frost lying across an empty field,
the sky after a storm has spent itself.

One fact became unavoidable.

She did not love me.

There were no hidden gestures,
no secret tenderness waiting to appear.
The cradle was quiet.

Strangely, once this was accepted,
the heart stopped arguing.

I looked at the winter trees
and saw that their naked branches
were not ashamed of themselves.

They simply showed their structure.

Perhaps this too is a form of beauty:
to exist without disguise.

Blame lost its importance.

The past became like weather
long since moved across the land.

It happened.
It left its marks.
Now it belongs to the same order
as mountains and rivers.

Rivers do not ask why they flow.
The sky does not justify its color.

Some lives receive warmth.
Others do not.

The fact itself is not cruel.
Cruelty begins
when we insist the world should be otherwise.

In youth I listened for the nightingale.
Songs of love, reconciliation, rescue.

Now I hear different sounds:
the call of an owl over winter fields,
wind moving through dry grass.

These too are part of the world’s music.

Peace arrives quietly.

It comes when we stop demanding
that the universe explain itself.

The stars above the fields
shine with the same indifference
they showed to generations before us.

Still, they are beautiful.

Not every child is held in tenderness.
Not every life is guided by gentle hands.

Yet the earth continues its turning.
Snow falls.
Rivers reach the sea.

And in accepting this
something within the soul grows steady.

I no longer ask for another story.

What happened is enough.

The sky is wide.
Stone is hard.
The sea remains dark beneath the wind.

To live within such truths
without bitterness -
perhaps this is the small dignity
granted to us.