Sisters at the Shore

The pull of Heartbreak and Hope

There’s a sound that tears the stars apart,
a voice of salt, and blood, and bone.
She sang me out from every harbor,
left my name beneath the foam.
Heartbreak, they call her,
but she was lovely first,
eyes like a storm that forgot it was sky,
lips full of dying thirst.

She dances with wreckage,
drinks sailors whole,
and yet I begged to be broken,
just to feel her soul.

Then came her sister, bright as breath,
light spilling from her wounds.
Hope, they whisper, is an angel
but she bleeds like something doomed.
She does not shout.
She waits.
She knows my weight.
She does not sing me under,
only into wake.

She kissed my ear with truth too sharp:
“Let go the ghost who held your heart.”
But the ghost still wears a siren’s skin
and smiles like she’ll drown me in
the same old ache I thought was art.

Now I live in the space between,
with one hand blistered from the reef
and one hand lifted, reaching clean
for wings too far above my grief.
They pull me, opposites, fierce and cruel,
one bound in mercy, one in rule.
They whisper futures in my spine.
One says “Die.”
The other says “Shine.”

I see them when the moon stands still:
Heartbreak swaying on the sill,
hair like night, eyes like knives,
a song that kills but feels alive.
And Hope, just behind her,
barefoot on stars,
quiet and burning
with unhealed scars.

I am their prisoner,
not by chain,
by ache, by want,
by holy pain.

But one day soon, I’ll tear the tide,
let heartbreak howl and drift aside.
Hope will catch me, clean and wide,
and I’ll rise, not run,
from the war inside.

'Til then, I ache with every breath,
between these sisters, life and death.
And when I fall, or when I mend,
they both will love me
to the end.