POEM: When the Body Breaks

When the Body Breaks
by Abel Saldana

It began, I think, in August—
though perhaps it was April,
that season where time loses its sharpness,
and illness, without apology,
slips past the calendar’s boundaries,
untethered by date or expectation.

It crept in slowly,
like a cunning intruder
testing the looseness of a window latch,
then dragging its weight
across the freshly swept floors
of the body I had tried so carefully
to keep in order.

It was a cold at first,
or maybe a flu—
one of those ordinary sicknesses
we pretend we are prepared for—
until it became something else entirely,
a fever that sank its heat
deep into the chambers of breath and bone,
turning familiar terrain
into something hostile,
and every cough
into a reckoning.

There was nothing metaphorical
about the pain,
nothing poetic
about the fatigue—
but still,
there was the undeniable sense
that some sanctity had been violated.

The body I once treated
as sacred ground,
with rituals of care
and whispered affirmations,
felt suddenly like a temple
whose walls had crumbled—
its mantras drowned
beneath the corrosion
gathering at the joints,
its inner sanctum
overrun by fire.

And yet—
there is a strange,
unexpected comfort
in the aftermath of such breaking.

When the storm finally passes—
as all storms do—
you return to the ruins
to find not absence,
but scaffolding still upright,
steel struts still rooted,
and in the cracks,
the fragile bloom
of something unshaken.

So I come back to myself,
not as I was before,
but as something more reverent,
more aware of the miracle
that is continued breath,
continued motion—
knowing now
that illness cannot render me unworthy,
cannot erase what is intrinsic.

It can only remind me,
in its cruel and aching way,
how holy this body was—
how holy it remains,
even in fracture,
even in fragments.