The Hour Before Light

The world holds its breath in the last blue hour, when stars begin their slow retreat and birds gather at the edge of singing.

Everything suspended— the dew still clinging to grass, the city's hum faint and distant, my own heartbeat the only clock that matters.

In this threshold, I am more than memory, less than dream, the space between what was and what insists on coming.

The sky softens like bruised fruit. A single cloud catches fire. Soon the world will demand itself again— the urgent, the ordinary, the light.

But here, in this holding, I am whole.