The Grinding
Poetry and Prose by Britt Wolfe
You step into the world like a promise—
bright as new coin, edges unshorn,
carrying the soft cargo of impossible mornings.
Somewhere between first gladness and the ledger,
the machinery hums.
At first, it is a slow fit:
pulley to pulley, dream to duty.
A gentle abrasion—an apprenticeship in small losses—
the soft callus of compromise forming where tenderness was.
But the machine is patient.
It knows how to wait until the bright is weathered.
Each year is a tooth in the mill:
you feed it hope, it chews it quietly,
turns the sugar of your wishes into grit.
Try. Fail. Try. Fail.
Try. Fail. Try. Fail.
A litany that hollows the ribs, syllable by syllable,
until even your voice becomes a smaller thing.
It is friction—brutal, unflashy—
the slow polishing of you into something recognisable by bills.
Dreams are sand between gears; they rasp and vanish.
You learn to measure delight in the spare change of evenings,
to barter exuberance for steadiness,
to trade wildness for the small architecture of survival.
You collect the injuries like stamps—pressed, catalogued—
a quiet philately of grief.
There is no single fracture; only the cumulative abrasion
that makes the body and the soul fit the mould.
The weight sits at the shoulders and never shifts:
it is not a load you carry and then lay down,
it is the new geography of you.
Each step grates.
Each laugh is trimmed with calculus.
You grow shorter by degrees—spine folding like something learned to bow—
closer to the ground where the dust waits.
Your hands remember how to mend, how to count, how to smooth rough edges;
they forget how to imagine.
Injustice folds into habit—domestic, familiar—
and fairy tales lose their punctuation.
The refrain becomes work, then endurance, then acceptance,
a dulling sequence where hope is not stolen so much as taxed.
Trying and failing cycles like a wheel with a missing spoke;
you keep balancing because you must.
Sometimes—rarely—you catch a fragment of the old sky:
a child’s laugh from a distance, a flash of uncalculated courage,
and for a breath you reclaim your original volume.
But the mill wants its grain.
It favours the obedient feedstock; it favours the small, predictable harvest.
In the end there is no dramatic ruin—no single catastrophe—
only the steady grinding into sediment,
the patient reduction of you into fine, useful dust.
You return, as everything does, to the earth that first held you—
not with triumph, but with the weary hush of a thing completed.
And if there is grace in this attrition, it is thin:
the learning to walk beneath weight without breaking,
the ability to cradle another’s brokenness because yours is known,
the small, stubborn gestures that refuse total erasure.
Still, the truth remains: the world grinds, and we are ground,
and becoming an adult is the slow, incised diminution
of brightness into soil.
Keep My Words Alive
If this poem has stayed with you, you can help keep my words alive or explore more of my work. Every bit of support helps carry the stories forward.
WHERE WORDS MEET MORNING LIGHT
BEGIN EACH DAY WITH SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL
Every morning at 7:11AM, I send a poem — sometimes soft, sometimes devastating, always true.
💚 Subscribe now to read and breathe and feel along with me 💚
Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe:
