There are days
when
finding the right words
feels like squeezing blood
from a stone.
Again and again,
I'm learning
that to reach the subcutaneous
I must carve—
a piece at a time,
a word at a time,
a syllable at a time.
A sculptor with trowel, hammer, chisel in hand
poised before the rough slab,
I keep the tools in motion
until the words that need to be here--
need to be here --
make themselves known,
revealing David from beneath the stone.
Backspaces float through the air like marble dust.
Crossed-out lines fall at my feet.
Ink spills like broken rock.
Fragments fall away as I carve,
like scales from my eyes
as what lives inside becomes known.
Perhaps, however
it's always been known.
Alive beneath the surface,
until, no longer tethered—
I reach for a pen,
pull it from the water,
give it breath.
And so I carve.
I scrape.
I let the gouges remain—
scars that whisper:
I was here.
I am still here.
I brush the dust from what emerges.
I trace the tendons,
the flex,
the pressure of fingers in flesh—
Bernini’s work in motion.
And sometimes, like Michelangelo,
I ache to leave a mark:
Michelangelo did this.
And he did.
But Mary was already there, alive within the stone.
She revealed herself
to us
through his hands.
Maybe that's what these words
are doing to me now.
They are not arriving—
they are remembering.
They were here.
And here, again, they rise.
And I, merely the conduit.
The midwife solemnly tasked
with bringing them into the into the light.
What an honor.
What a privilege.
To squeeze the lifeblood from the rock.
To breathe life into the to unspoken.
And save these words
from the stone.