The Messy Middle

Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe

We hymn the gilded Once-Upon,
where light unfurls like banners on a citadel’s brow,
and we linger at the elegiac close—
the heart split wide as a cathedral door,
finally admitting the wind.

But who dares chronicle the middle—
that uncharted stretch
where the compass spins
and the story forgets its own name?

Here, the protagonist falters mid-stride,
not from thunder or spectacle,
but from the slow erosion of ordinary days—
laundry folded with trembling hands,
apologies rehearsed in the velvet dark,
love arriving without fanfare,
in the quiet weight of shared silence
and the stubborn rising of bread.

This is the realm of almosts and not-quites,
of scar tissue learning the shape of strength,
of maps dissolving in relentless rain
while blistered, unheroic feet
trace the same uncertain mile.

No choruses swell.
No laurels wait.

Only the patient work of repair:
a cracked teacup mended with gold,
a promise kept
when keeping it feels like carrying water in a sieve.

Here, courage wears no crown—
only small mercies:
a second cup of tea poured without asking,
forgiveness offered
before the wound has cooled.

We move through these pages
the way headlights carve a single metre through fog
on a back road—
each beam a fragile promise
to what waits beyond the dark.

And still we drive.
Still we drive—
through the fog that is neither beginning nor end,
but the living heart of story itself,
where endings are forged quietly,
and every broken thing
is, somehow,
made whole.

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Poetry by Britt Wolfe: