Jordan Riley

A vow is a promise in the dark.
Like the oven light left on at night—an electric votive
burning to say, “I am still here.”

When the worst happens, those devoted to you
gather in that light. They stand beside you.

We have forgotten what the word actually means.
Devotio is a vow made away.
It does not mean staying. It means leaving.

It means stepping out of the light first
and walking into what is not yet known.
Not to absorb the blow, and not to wage the fight,
but to take the burden early enough that the fear itself can be set down.
In a courtroom, we do not merely stand with you. We advance.

Grief, not triumph, made the most ornate order in architecture.

A basket of toys left on a child’s grave,
a roof tile set against the rain,
acanthus growing up through both—
the composition an architect once saw and kept.

That accidental monument to a lost child
has been repeated in stone for centuries.

Families still break in courthouses.
Look up if you are there.
The same form that began as shelter for a child’s things
now frames the fight over what remains.

Mediation is declining that fight.
It is walking back down the steps.
Like the rain that once fell on the grave, it chooses to let something enduring grow from the pain rather than keep striking at it.

The Minotaur is a split frame of a real image.

A bull let loose in the labyrinth of a palace,
moving fast but not breaking things.
Not a monster, not half-human;
but a beast with a human for a dance partner.

Minoan bull dancers thrilled at the sound of a charge
from the dark, alighting to steer the unstoppable
terror out of the impossible maze.

The beast knows every turn of the labyrinth,
but none of its destinations.
Those are the interests of its human leads;
and their virtue, the dance made of the journey there.
We still vault over brute force with grace.
We do not break things. We choose our destinations. Our destiny.