Between Bruises and Blooms

I found a prayer carved into bone,
bleached white beneath a prairie sun.
No heartbeat left.
No breath.
Only the architecture of survival.

The antlers still reached for the sky
as if they had forgotten
that the body was gone.

There is something holy
about what refuses to disappear.

The wind polished every sorrow,
the rain carried away every name,
yet here it rested—
beautiful in the honest way
only time can make something.

People fear skeletons
because they mistake them for endings.

But I have learned differently.

A skull is proof
that something once loved the morning,
ran through tall grass,
lifted its head beneath a thousand moons.

Death did not erase it.

It simply stripped away
everything that wasn’t meant to last.

And somehow…

what remained
was enough to stop a passing soul
on a lonely highway
and remind her

that even after life leaves,
there can still be beauty
worth carrying home.