The Poetry of Waiting
Not the break,
but the breath before the break.
Not the silence,
but the listening it invites.
A caesura is not absence,
it is presence held still.
A hush with its hands open.
A comma that prays.
It lives in the gasp
between heartbeat and echo,
in the moment the dancer
hovers mid-turn,
in the glance that says
more than the line ever could.
It is the ache
that punctuation cannot name.
The pause
where grief gathers its syllables.
The space
where longing loops back to begin again.
We write it
with white space,
with hesitation,
with the courage
to not fill every line.
We live it
in hospital waiting rooms,
in the hush before “I love you,”
in the breath between diagnosis and reply.
Caesura –
the sacred seam
where poetry listens
to the body.
A caesura is a metrical pause or break in a verse where one phrase ends and another begins. It can occur in the middle of a line of poetry and is often marked by punctuation such as a comma or a dash. The term originates from the Latin word meaning "cutting" and serves to create rhythm and meaning in literary works.