The Eye That Rose From the Waters

June 29, 2025|Poetry

A poetic essay on emergence, grief, and the clarity of soul-seeing

There comes a moment on the path of transformation
when feeling everything becomes too much,
and yet numbing is no longer an option.

A moment when the only way forward
is to become the one who witnesses,
not as a way of escaping,
but as an act of sacred reclamation.

This art was born from that moment.

An eye opens, not just in flesh,
but in essence,
wide with truth,
lined with fire,
rimmed in gold.

It is not crying.
It is not shut.
It is not afraid.

This is the eye of the one
who has grieved enough to stop begging,
who has burned enough to stop hiding,
who has drowned and returned
with salt in her veins and knowing in her bones.

The sea beneath her lashes tells the tale,
waves drawn in rough strokes,
layered blues and purples like old bruises,
each ripple a memory that used to sting.
But now, they move without overtaking her.
Now, she floats above them.

This is grief witnessed, not carried.

This is resilience without performance,
the kind that comes not from holding it all together,
but from letting it all fall apart,
again and again,
until what remains
is only what’s real.

The sky behind her blazes in hues of death and dawn,
orange, rust, rose,
the breathless colors of something ending
and something beginning
in the same breath.

She has walked through that sky.
She has stood in that fire.
And now she sees.
She sees everything.

There is a quiet clarity here.
The kind that hums in the bones.
The kind that doesn’t need to shout.
The kind that speaks in golden threads
from the iris of a soul that remembers itself.

And yet… even in all this sobered seeing,
a flicker of softness remains.

The glow around her suggests that hope,
tender, cautious, flickering,
is beginning to return.

Not the naïve kind that hopes for ease,
but the sacred kind that trusts in the alchemy of what is hard.
The kind that knows
light can only enter through what has broken.

This is not just art.
This is you,
no longer lost in the wave,
no longer consumed by the flame,
but risen above both
with a gaze that blesses
everything it sees.