A Poem a Day (696): The ruby heart

 
The ruby heart
 
The ruby heart, it glows, it breathes,
knows itself yet truly no one else.
It lives within. It sings a song sometimes,
only to itself, a low, languorous rhyme,
keeps home in its ribcage, draws itself in,
its trivial humour a shield.
 
With the years it grows wise,
yet still no wiser than it was. Childlike,
it sometimes beats with wild abandon,
loves with an ardency it had forgot,
how it burned in the decades before,
and yet it was always there, buried deep.
 
Other times it is silent, at rest out to sea,
in the calm before the uncalculated storm.
The ruby heart can only be what it is,
it cannot flit to suit another’s whim
or pretend to be something it is not.
It is only a gem. This little precious thing.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, November 20, 2024