Where the Light Fractures

On the strange luminosity of broken places.

Where the Light Fractures

There are chambers in the heart
where radiance enters differently,
where tenderness once carried
leaves a slender aperture
between who we were
and who we are still discovering.

I used to believe the breaking
marked the terminus of something sacred,
that once a thing had splintered
it could never again contain beauty
with the same exquisite certainty.

Then evening found the window.

The sun descended against the glass
and every fissure became incandescent,
delicate faults burnished gold,
severed edges gathering
more brilliance than the unbroken pane
had ever known how to contain.

Within that illumination,
sorrow revealed its unspoken instruction.

Wounds can become gateways.
Loss may leave a passage
wide enough for dawn.
Endings excavate tender spaces
through the center of us
until morning reaches
the rooms we kept veiled.

Perhaps restoration
has never required
a return toward what existed before.

Perhaps it asks us to remain permeable,
allowing warmth through every crevice,
giving grief and wonder
their simultaneous residence,
carrying what has fractured
while tending what still unfurls.

I have known devastation
alongside luminosity.

I have stood among the remnants
of what I believed enduring
and watched an unfamiliar horizon
spill through the ruptures.

When illumination splinters now,
I remain before it.

Across the floor,
a scattering of small suns
gathers among the shadows,
transfiguring what once appeared
irreparable.

Within that brilliance
I finally understand the wisdom
held by broken places:

what has been fractured
may still become
a vessel for the sun.

---

© 2026 Monica A. Leyva. All rights reserved.

---