Jordan A. Leturgez

There is a humility in the size of things:
a cup cradled in two hands, steam
that remembers the shape of your palms.
Think small, and the world fits --
a porch light, a book opened at midnight,
the slow exactness of a single, ordinary day.

To think small is to learn the grain
of wood, the contour of your own patience.
It is noticing the way rain scolds the windows
and then forgives them. It is keeping a map
of the streets that lead to your mother's kitchen,
memorizing the sound of laughter in one room.

But small thinking can be a fence, too --
a line that narrows horizons into neat, safe boxes.
It trims the wild edges until only the comfortable remains,
tethers wonder to routine and calls it wisdom.
When fear lives in small thinking, it shrinks the moon,
makes risk an expensive superstition.

Still, there is courage in choosing small:
to plant one tomato and watch it learn sunlight,
to hold one hand through one long conversation,
to refuse the constant roar that promises more.
Living small can be a radical act of focus,
an economy of love, a devotion to depth over display.

So let your smallness be generous:
pamper detail with attention, let tenderness grow,
allow the tiny things to teach you scale.
Keep room for sudden expansion -- a kindness that widens,
a door left open to the sky. Think small to sharpen sight,
live small to feel everything close and true.

We live to see the day -- not as a promise
but as a small, stubborn miracle.
Night folds its palms and hides its eyes,
but we keep watch: breath against cold glass,
fingers tracing the map of where we were.

We live to see the day when the sky
learns to be generous again,
spilling light like an apology
across roofs, across the rumor of streets.
There is a language in the way dust trembles
as if remembering how to be gold.

We live to see the day for quiet things:
a cup warming a palm, a child's laugh
peeling like sun through the laundry,
an old song hummed into a doctor's waiting room.
We live to see the day for heavy things too--
for names spoken without the clatter of tears,
for graves that become gardens under our hands.

We live to see the day because someone
laid down their fear like a bridge,
because someone else dug their knees in and would not move.
Because the past keeps sending signals: ashes that still warm,
letters folded in pockets, the weight of lessons learned.
We carry them forward, not as anchors but as fuel.

We live to see the day to fill it: with repair,
with stubborn kindness, with stubborn laughter.
We live to see the day and learn again to trust
the small mercy of morning: that light arrives
even when we have nothing left to bargain with.
We rise anyway, shoulder to shoulder with dawn,
bearing the quiet stubbornness of survivors.

We live to see the day -- and when it comes,
we do not hoard it. We open every window,
let it move through us like wind, let it wake the seeds.
We lay our palms on the world and say, here.
We are here to meet you. We are here to keep you.
We are here to make of this bright terrible gift
a life that remembers why it wanted light.

Say it once like folding an old letter--
the edges soften, the ink blurs,
a confession turned into paper boats
set out on a late-summer river.
Nevermind, and the current takes it,
not cruel, not kind, simply moving.

Say it soft as moth wings against a lamp,
a small apology for wants that burned too bright.
Nevermind becomes a lullaby for the stubborn heart,
a quiet room where arguments unpeel
and sunlight finds the dust in forgiving ways.

There is a strange mercy in the word:
not erasing, but shelving--putting the ache
on a high shelf where we can see it, not live in it.
Nevermind teaches hands to unclench,
teaches mouths to close around the sharp things.

Sometimes it is a door left ajar,
sometimes an ocean swallowing a name.
It is not surrender to the night--more like
learning the map of your own soft places,
tracing the seams where sorrow and relief meet.

Say it when you must: to a fault, to a friend, to the mirror.
Let it be small and human, a bell rung for passage.
Nevermind--three syllables that carry a cross and a key,
a weathered hush that somehow clears the room,
and leaves you ready, at last, for morning.

I deserve better -- a small verdict I learned to say aloud,
like lighting a match in a room that taught me to whisper.

I have swallowed crumbs of affection until my hunger
became ordinary; I have made my voice polite, then thin.
No more. I am unlearning the grammar of keeping quiet
so someone else can be comfortable.

My tenderness is not rent money for a temporary bed.
My time is not a currency to be spent on excuses.
I refuse to catalog my worth by the frequency of your return.
I will not measure my days by how well I fit into your absence.

I deserve better -- not as punishment to you
but as a home I build for myself, brick by reclaimed breath.
I will plant mornings where my name blooms first,
where promises are not fossils but living trees.

If love is a map, I will redraw the borders.
If patience is a seed, I will choose where it is sown.
I will set my feet where my heart is not apologizing,
where my laugh is full, where my wounds are tended.

I deserve better -- this is not anger, it is stewardship.
It is the quiet revolution of learning to keep my own light,
to walk out of rooms that dim me and into days that match me.
I deserve better -- and finally, I will answer to that.

They call it silence, but it is not empty --
it hums like a hidden loom where meaning is woven.
A single lamp trims the room into a small sky,
and dust motes are galaxies being born and dying
inside the slow orbit of my hands.

Outside the street shouts and the city breathes loud,
but here I learn the language of careful motions:
the soft knuckle of a pencil against paper,
the patient stitch that holds a seam together,
the low arithmetic of decisions turned to habit.

Silence is not a void but a kind of listening --
it opens like a window when the world closes its doors.
My breath keeps time; my heart is the metronome.
Every small task becomes a constellation:
seeming fragments that, in this hush, are named and guided.

I work as if something is waiting just beyond sound,
a truth that needs the slow polishing of attention.
When the day finally leans back and the lamp goes out,
I carry away the work like a quiet harvest --
fruit that tastes of dusk and a steady, wordless faith.