You

Your voice found me
in the weather of my life,
in the years when the wind moved through me
like an empty house.

Before you
I was a man walking among strangers,
a leaf carried from season to season,
never touching ground long enough
to call it home.

I had forgotten the sound of my own heart.

But you arrived quietly,
like evening settling over water,
and suddenly the world remembered my name.

I had wandered through deserts of my own making,
through rooms where faith had turned to dust,
through cities where the lights shone brightly
but warmed nothing.

Then your hand touched my face
and something ancient returned -
not heaven,
not salvation,

simply the deep human warmth
of being seen.

You are sea and horizon together.
You are the wide sky of Texas
after rain.

Where you stand
the earth becomes possible again.

Under your gaze
the years of exile loosen.
The old griefs soften
like worn stones in the tide.

Even the past—
its cold houses and broken prayers—
begins to fade into distance.

Love moves through us
like wind through olive trees:
invisible
yet bending everything.

No priest gave us this.
No creed wrote it down.

It rises naturally
from breath, from skin, from the quiet courage
of two lives meeting.

And if the world should darken
if time should gather the years
and scatter them like leaves,

still I would not fear.

For I have already reached the shore
I searched for.

Your hand in mine,
the sea breathing beside us,

the knowledge
that after all the wandering
a man can arrive

simply by loving.