A prayer woven in absence (Marcella Boccia)
I have woven a prayer in the threads of your absence,
each strand a memory, each knot a whispered longing.
The silence of your leaving fills the spaces
where once your voice was a song upon my heart,
and now, it echoes only in the hollow between breaths.
Oh love, how do I speak to you now?
When the air no longer carries your name,
and the stars refuse to shine in the places
where we once danced beneath their gaze?
Still, I call you with a prayer not of words,
but of the spaces we once shared—
the quiet places where the soul touches
what the body cannot reach. In this absence,
I have learned to listen
not to the sound of footsteps,
but to the absence between them,
not to the words we spoke,
but to the silence that carries them onward.
I have woven you into the fabric of the night,
each thread a sigh, each moment a prayer
sent up in the smoke of a fire
that no longer burns,
but whose warmth lingers on the edges of my skin.
So I whisper to the wind,
not for you to hear,
but for the world to feel—
the prayer I have woven in your absence,
a prayer that will remain,
not as a plea for return,
but as a testament to the love
that has no need of presence
to live and breathe
in the spaces we have left behind.
