Reformation is the second poem in my elemental poetry trilogy, Elemental Benediction, which explores the arc of obliteration, healing, and eventual reclamation through the forces of fire, wind, earth, and water. Where Obliteration (Part I) was a fire and wind storm—an act of destruction, rage, and necessary loss—Reformation (Part II) is the aftermath: the quiet, brittle terrain of survival.
This poem lives in the decades where I held it all together, raising my children as a single parent while enmeshed in a family system that could not see me. I lived in a constant state of vigilance, choosing men who mirrored the harm I had known, unable to believe in love that did not cost me everything. My body was the battleground, the barrier, and the scaffolding.
Reformation is a benediction of scorched earth and quiet hope. It is what happens when the fire has passed, but the air still smells like smoke. When the ground is ruined but not dead. When grief becomes compost. When the body doesn’t trust peace, but something in it begins—cautiously, tentatively—to reach for it anyway.
The final poem in the series, Reclamation, will follow. It will not be a return to who I was, but the creation of someone entirely new. A woman who plants her own name in the soil and dares to grow.
Reformation
I awake from the nightmare—
soul in shards.
Charred soil unmoving beneath me.
Embers sear my soles;
my toes curl in ash.
I stand surrounded
by the bones of old prayers,
stacked like monuments
against the light.
Freedom eludes me.
I am still a prisoner—
only now,
I am the cage maker.
The darkness still clings.
I am still alone.
I give the earth my body—
Bones braced across the cracks
So no one else falls in.
I become the scaffolding of their childhood,
Even as my core buckles and rots.
My grief presses up from below—
molten, ancient.
I keep it buried
so they can have lullabies
instead of sirens.
I swallow every quake.
Bite my tongue until it scars.
Smile through the aftershocks
so they believe the world still stands.
(And maybe, so do I.)
I hold onto hope
Like a drop of water
in the Sahara—
precious,
evaporating.
Hope quenches.
I am the earth:
Scorched,
cracked,
but ready.
A sallow field
awaiting rain.
A graveyard of roots
still dreaming in their sleep.
I can taste
the dreams my soul
never dared to breathe.
When I close my eyes,
I see a future.
Not clear—
but becoming.
The earth will replenish.
Seedlings will reach,
Fragile and foolish.
Hope will bloom
like weeds in cracks—
uninvited,
unstoppable.
I am the water
that soothes scorched ground,
softens the brittle,
and makes room
for tenderness to live.
I am the reservoir
that holds grief,
turning bone to bloom,
letting sorrow dissolve
without drowning.
Even now,
I cannot name this peace.
But I feel it—
Like moisture in the air
Before rain.
I am not healed.
But something in me
wants to be.
Writer’s Note: The religious undertones in this piece are not a gesture toward faith or divinity, but a deliberate reclamation of language that once harmed me. They reflect the absence of the comfort I was told should exist. For much of my life, religion was not sanctuary—it was a source of deep trauma, control, and shame. That rupture lives inside this poem. Any echoes of prayer or benediction are not aimed at God, but at the act of surviving in a world that offered me no such grace.
© 2025 Autumn Giberson. All rights reserved.