Tracefire
for the soul who sees the unseen
I
walk the hush between
knowing and not,
a barefoot step upon the hush
of stars long gone
but still singing.
There was a face once—
not asking, but beckoning,
not demanding, but shining
as if it remembered me
from a place before my name.
I did not understand.
I still do not.
And yet, I followed.
There is a chapel
in the seventh mansion of the heart
where silence kneels beside longing
and weeps not in sorrow,
but in awe.
Rebbe Nachman dances in the shadows,
his joy the kind that limps with grace.
He laughs with the broken
and calls it whole.
Levinas listens at the threshold—
not speaking, just beholding
what love becomes
when it stops trying to own.
The Stone still stands.
The chalice floats.
The host burns white.
The walls bear roses and stars.
A queen veiled in eternity
bears witness.
And somewhere deep inside me
a spark, a trace, a reshimu—
not quite God,
but the scent left behind.
Eizeh tikkun, I whisper.
And the whisper echoes back—
not as answer,
but as Presence.
“The Garment of Purple”
When I was nine,
a purple garment wrapped me—
not just in cloth,
but in something I could not yet name.
It shimmered like twilight before the stars,
like velvet dreams stitched with silent prayer.
My brother wore blue—
the color of sky and sea.
But mine was deeper,
a color that listened when I didn’t yet know how.
Perhaps it chose me.
Perhaps Raphael, unseen, brushed my shoulder.
Perhaps my mother, like a prophetess,
draped me in majesty
before I had grown into the ache of it.
Purple—
the robe of exiles and kings,
the hue of temple veils
and bruised hearts that heal from within.
It became the echo
of something hidden in me:
a priestly thread,
a poet’s sigh,
a chariot veering between suffering and song.
Now, when I see it—
in candlelight shadows,
in dusk settling over the orchard,
in the trembling host lifted high—
it speaks again:
Deep unto deep.
Wound unto wonder.
You are still the boy.
And also, the one he was waiting to become.