Weighted Wings

They say a man stands on his own,
but I know better
I am scaffolded by five voices, five names,
five reasons my knees haven’t buckled.
I have swallowed blaze for them.
I have let the night carve trenches in my face for them.
I have drowned in the silent, bottomless places of fatherhood
and surfaced gasping, only because they needed me breathing.

They orbit me like stars with their own heat,
burning different colors
Josiah, a sharp wind that cuts clean through iron,
Cee Cee, a storm split by a burnished seam of song,
Jeremiah, the hum before the fierce avalanche,
Charis, muted thunder that builds and does not break,
Jedidiah, a firefly throb in the throat of the dark.
And now the gift unearned, the grafted flame that taught Josiah to carry blaze.

Each one, a freight and a wing.
Each one, something I cannot bear and cannot live without.

I have cried with hands pressed against a steering wheel,
with my forehead against the grain of a locked door,
with my mouth against the silence of an empty room
because of them.
Because of the way they carve themselves into my ribs.
Because of the way they are beautiful and fragile and full of war.
Because I cannot harden them without losing them.
Because I cannot protect them from what they must learn alone.

They are the architects of my collapse.
They are the scaffold that keeps me standing.

They do not know how often I hemorrhage in the spaces between their laughter.
How their voices are the thread that stitches me together.
How I keep going because to stop
would be to leave them unfinished, half-built, unguarded.

I will not.

Even when I am shattered,
when my body is rust and my spirit is smoke,
when my exhale is a house with too many ghosts
I will stand.
I will carry them, even when they no longer need to be carried.
They are born unknowing.
I will love them, even when love feels like a blade.

I will endure,

because 
I 
must.

Because they are mine.
Because I am theirs.