I
Each mind holds truth like water in cupped hands.
The shape conforms to fingers, lifelines, scars.
What drips between these palms might drench
these lands with floods,
yet here we are safe and waiting like
the woman at the well,
parched but sure the taste we know
is how all water flows.
But truth, like light through prisms,
is spectrum bent:
yours in indigos, mine caught in amber,
as we drink the same essence,
though call it different names.

II
The cutting blade of conviction can
slice us clean apart.
Your truth, my truth, edges sharp, territories
marked by what
we’ve known, each incision brings the blood.
And yet, underneath discordant ways
there runs a bassline pulsing in the bone,
the frequency to which
we all belong, not truth possessed but truth
we’ve always known:
that pain is pain,
that we all weep,
that children need their sleep,
that we all need to eat
that curiosity persists
that something in us seeks
the good, even in the bad.

III
The messy resin of truth felt and seen
like a hug on a bleak day
binds broken things
at the sticking place where contradictions meet
and somehow hold.
Not unitary, no, but the coloured strings
between us, taut with tension, strong with doubt,
the questions that we share, not answers found.
For truth was never meant to sort us out
but draw us close on this uncertain ground
where what is real is what we find,
and truth becomes the knot, not blade,
the tether between past and future,
between self and other,
that allows uncertainty together.

 

14/8/2025