One Breath

You don't need extremes
to reckon with your tenderness
or the thunderous parts of you.
They exist whether you're open or closed.

Standing in a thousand acres
or folded into your hoodie
on a bus stop bench,
the feeling weighs the same.

Frontiers make survival obvious,
all that space demanding courage,
but it always comes down
to something much smaller.

The line in the sand
compresses to atom width,
narrow as the choice
between staying and going.

Your thunder needs no stage,
your tenderness no permission.
Both live in the space
between one breath and the next.