Copper

Once molten, poured into the hunger of forms, now cooling into its own color— burnished, deliberate, warm as skin remembering the furnace. Time writes its grammar in green: verdigris blooming like frost in reverse, the slow vocabulary of exposure, each breath of rain a sentence rewriting what was smooth into something weathered. The air knows it. Oxidation is translation— the language of transformation made visible, made patient, made beautiful through years of being honestly present to everything. We polish what we wish to keep unchanged, but the copper knows better: to become oneself is to surrender the shine for the stain, the bright for the earned.