A break in the shadow,

              opening the patterns of bricks older

than the thoughts of any of us, of how we change

with facts, formulas, choreographies, dramas—

                        what fills us the way light

makes us visible to each other, across the space

of difference to here, where we dream worlds,

even as some were taken from us on a single

night in winter’s early coldness.

           

             We ask, in the hours of our grief,

inevitable questions of this senseless thing,

without a reason, it seems, without a just reason,

a heart turning on itself to choose taking life

as an answer to life.

               When it was there, the elm

held itself as it held University Hall, against

endings, so that we can hold loss accountable,

lift it up to the sun, that miracle connecting us

that night a heart eaten by its own ache gave us

an ache we could not imagine.

A break in the shadow…

             opening the patterns of bricks older

than the thoughts of any of us…can lead us

to think of what it means to be a collective hope,

an unfailing faith in a world we can become.

                                                                               —January 25, 2026