Moon at Half Past Noon

I was an archipelago of One,
my voice the only wind beneath my sun.
I took the peach, felt its sun-downy skin,
and bit, believing sweetness from within
was mine by right—not gift of patient root,
of graft-knit branch, of worm-turned earth, of soot
from some old fire that warmed a stranger’s spring.
I ate in darkness, an oblivious king.

To earn my thanks, a giver had to be
a scent that lingers but denies the bee,
a warmth that leaves no ash upon the stone.
I learned them by the things they left alone:
the uncreased pillow, the untouched second chair,
the perfect silence after music there.
They earned my debt by practicing retreat—
a taste of absence, strangely bittersweet,
that propped my hollow days without a sound.

But what of me, who held this borrowed ground?
The grace received became a palate’s change.
To speak true thanks, the tongue must first grow strange,
must lose the taste for mine, that constant salt.
I bought the sight by fasting in the fault
that split my glass-and-iron core: a chill
like river-water rising, against my will,
to drown the furnace of my self-made creed.
I paid in shivers. I atoned in need.
Okagesama—the cool cloth on the head,
the shade that costs the very light it shed,
the quiet tax collected in the vein
for every breath I did not have to strain.

Then came the feast. The table was of oak,
so wide our own hands to our mouths were weak.
I smelled the broth I could not lift. I heard
the wooden scrape of spoon on bowl—no word—
as the stranger opposite lifted, held,
and with the grit of his own hunger, spelled
an arc of steam into my waiting dark.
My song of self was paper in that heat;
it curled and blackened. I was made complete
not by the strength I lent, but by the burn
of someone else’s broth. I had to learn
the right to be so filled by foreign hands,
to know the texture of a full surrender.

Gratitude is the ache inside the jaw
after the first true meal you ever saw.
It is the quiet after-glow of shame,
a different kind of warmth, a slower flame.
It is the thread, not spun from your own wool,
that mends the tear when you have been less full.

I am here because a hand I never saw
once planed a splinter from a public bench.
I felt the change—the smoothness where a notch
had caught my thread—and only then could feel
the debt within the grain. The kindness, real
because it left no witness to its cost.
My peace was bought by every comfort lost,
by counting, on the skin, each breath of air
that moved from other lungs to nourish there.

The “I” is a taste forgotten on the tongue.
The “We” is the broth from which all songs are sung.
A borrowed warmth. A shared, subversive skin.
This is the only world I enter in.