Beautiful Ruins

The scent of clean floors calls me home

To rooms where your patience learned to roam

Your favorite meal still on the stove

For visits I promised but never drove

Those tiny shoes you'd hold and smile

My childhood caught in leather's pile

You raised me up from sink to sky

Now I breathe your love through lullabies

In photographs that can't hold warmth

In living rooms where ghosts take form

Your memory holds me in the dark

And attempts to light my hidden spark

Beautiful ruins where you smiled

Unconditional raised this child

Oh, your love too vast for graves to hold

These sacred spaces still unfold, burning

10,000 miles can't hold the weight

Of words I saved for far too late

You fed the multitudes with grace

While I just dreamed of your embrace

Those toddler shoes, your rosary

Of who I was, who you helped me be

Each scuff and stain a prayer you made

For the boy you bathed, the man you saved

The hammock sways though you're not here

Your voice in every falling tear

Your memory holds me in the dark

And attempts to light my hidden spark

Beautiful ruins where you smiled

Unconditional raised this child

Oh, your love too vast for graves to hold

These sacred spaces still unfold, burning

They say come see where you lay down

But you're not there in that hometown

Just earth and dates and words that try

To hold a love that won't fit inside

So I carry you in clean floor scent

In tiny shoes, in love you lent

In stories that I'll always tell

In patience woven through each spell

Beautiful ruins where you smiled

You never met my own sweet child

But they'll know you through stories told

These sacred spaces still unfold

These beautiful ruins where you smiled

Unconditional raised this child

Those little shoes still fit somehow