A Moment of Shedding
By Ellie Machiani
There’s something about the magic of night, its darkness, its stillness. As if the world softens just enough for you to slip into its secrets. I often practice breathwork at night. There’s a quiet expectancy to the darkness, as though the silence itself is waiting, just to tangle with yours.
When you sit with it long enough, you can hear your own heartbeat like a distant drum, steady, ancient and entirely you. Then there’s the chaos. That trembling edge between quiet and chaos stirs something in me, and writing becomes the only way to release it, as if the page, too, has been waiting.
With this poem, I tried to capture a moment, a shedding of identity, pain, and form. A shedding that does not necessarily come from clarity, but from something quieter, like accepting darkness. What follows isn’t certainty, but a kind of rebirth, rooted in breath, holding everything at once: life and death, ending and beginning, all in the same moment.
I wore the chains that looked like skin,
Until the silence called me in,
It held no answers, made no sound,
Just let me fall beneath the ground.
No promise made, no bargain struck,
Just shadows folding into luck.
My name dissolved, my shape grew thin,
I shed the cage I once lived in.
The dark was wide, and not unkind.
It asked for nothing, not even mind.
It held me close, and let me be,
Until I burned invisibly.
A trembling started in my chest,
A wave that shook me from my rest.
The breath came deep, then tore apart
The boundaries guarding every part.
I cracked, I soared, I sank, I bled
Each breath a thread through what was dead.
My body vanished into flame,
And nothing answered to my name.
I saw my sorrow bloom like smoke,
A thousand faces that I broke.
And through the grief, a hollow sound
A wordless love that wrapped around.
