Lesly Portugal
I rose again. Not crowned, not chosen,
but drawn by gravity older than thrones,
a call like starlight tugging at the tide of my blood.
Something would not disappear.
A dim pull lingered, like warmth of a sun long extinguished,
drawing me from the soil, where my failures had learned my shape.
I had loved once. In loving, I broke.
What I carried spilled behind me across the ground of that breaking
bright fragments of what we almost were, scattered like constellations no one names anymore,
left where I fell.
Dying was simple.
It was returning that asked more of me.
This world is unhurried.
It teaches how shattered things still know how to move.
that ruin drifts forward, the way stars do; silent, patient, and inevitable.
I walked towards a distant glow with your absence held close within,
like a moon carried through endless nights.
I learned to hold a blade carefully; it cuts both ways.
Law and freedom, devotion, and loss.
Madness whispered.
Grief burned loud.
Still, I advanced.
Through ruins that remembered fire,
through ash that remembered bodies,
through silence that remembered screams.
Above it all, the firmament watched,
indifferent, eternal,
its order is vast enough to forget me.
Every road promised an ending:
Some dark, some empty, some gleaming with borrowed grace.
I learned them all.
I opted to keep walking.
To rise again is to know the world will strike you down,
that mercy is not personal, power does not ask who pays for it.
I learned this beneath cold stars, where fate loosens its grip
And leaves you alone with possibility.
I once dreamed of the highest seat. Not to rule, not to be praised,
but to step aside,
let the world breathe without command,
so, your name may survive the telling
unburdened by law or flame.
What remade me was not light, but decision,
Standing where others stopped.
Bearing every ending at once.
Walking willingly into the dark.
Carrying fury, fire, loss and moving anyway.
Now, when the burning has cooled to quiet embers,
when the future no longer haunts me,
when the stars hang low and gentle,
unchained from fear
I find you.
Not as a memory.
Not as a shadow.
But as the constant that outlived every order.
All crowns, all ruin, all endings
Fade beneath this vast, blue quiet.
In the age of distant stars,
where even gods learn to let go,
I rise again.
Not to rule the world, but to love you
without end.