Lighthouse Wife

I married a man of the sea.

Salt lives deep in his bones.

The horizon rests in his eyes

like something he once chased

and never fully left behind.

They told me the war was over.

The uniform folded.

The medals sleeping in a drawer.

The world moving forward

as if violence were a season

that knew how to end.

But some wars do not stay

where they were fought.

They travel quietly in the marrow.

They rise like weather in the skull.

They walk the corridors of memory

with boots no one else can hear.

Sometimes he speaks of it.

A flash of steel.

A sound that tore the sky apart.

A moment when the living world

became something that did not breathe.

Other memories remain sealed

behind doors that even love cannot open.

I have learned the languages of silence.

The tightening of his jaw

when a sudden noise cracks the air.

The way his eyes drift far beyond the room

as if the past has reached forward

and taken him by the collar.

I have learned how to sit beside a ghost

and pretend the chair is empty.

Some nights he sleeps

like a man safely returned to shore.

Other nights

the ocean comes back for him.

He thrashes through darkness

breathing like someone drowning

in waters no one else can see.

I place my hand against his chest

and wait for the storm to pass.

But the hardest hours are the quiet ones.

The small, ordinary moments

when the phone rings into silence

longer than it should.

My heart becomes a lighthouse

turning slowly through the dark

searching the horizon

for a ship that will not answer.

People speak of courage

as if it belongs only to battlefields.

They do not speak of the courage

it takes to stay.

To wake each morning

with ghosts pressing their cold hands

against the glass of your mind.

To walk through daylight

while carrying a night

that never completely ends.

Still he rises.

Still he breathes.

And every night

before sleep finally finds me

I listen carefully

in the dark beside him.

Because I married a man of the sea.

And once

more than once

he tried to sail past the edge of this world.

So I lie awake beside

the tide of his breathing

like a lighthouse

praying

the ocean does not take him

before morning.

Reviews

[Yellow Submarine.]

you are indeed a poet. i wish I had the poets mindset. I don't, so i write in story form instead. I think some are simply born poets. im impressed with your ability.