The soul is not made of fire.
It is vapor
a question left in the mouth of the wind,
never answered, only carried
from one silent sky to another.
I have walked the lip of the world
where cloudlight stumbles over its own shadow,
and the ocean forgets its own hunger
just to listen.
In that place,
I called out to the soul,
not like a prayer,
but like a wave speaking back to the moon
without hope,
only pattern.
It did not answer.
It never does.
But something changed in the listening.
We are not shaped by what moves us,
but by what leaves us still.
Not by thunder,
but by the long ache after it.
The soul isn’t a star
waiting to be named.
It is the silence
between two tides
where light forgets itself
and becomes meaning.
I have drowned
in skies with no ceiling,
in winds that peeled language from my spine.
Still, I floated
not upward,
but inward.
There is no ascent.
Only deepening.
Only the sky folding in
like an old map soaked in salt.
And perhaps
we were never meant to find the soul,
only to feel the weight
of not finding it
the hush that remains
when the wave
refuses to crash.
Copyright Malcolm Gladwin
July 2025
The Sky that forgot to Fall
