Smoke

By Dina Mistry

Summer and winter touch my lips
like leaves vanishing out of sight.
They don’t stay the way I want them to be.
The leaves dance with the wind,
sing with the birds
and I stand there,
knowing it will all leave me too.
My beloved
both strange and familiar
like something I was never meant to keep.
Everything ends.
But the mark it leaves
does not.
I saw something beautiful.
So beautiful
I forgot to reach for my phone.
Now there is no proof.
Only me
insisting it was real.
How do I make them believe
in something
that lived only in my eyes?
How do I explain
that it wasn’t illusion
just something
the world refused to witness with me?
Do I have to carve it into my soul
until it looks like evidence?
Do I have to bleed
for it to be believed?
How do I prove the leaf danced because I was there?
Not the other way around.But no one listens
when you say
something chose you.
Especially not people
who have always been loved
without question.

Meet the author

I think a lot, probably more than I should. I get attached to moments,
conversations, and people in ways I don’t always understand.