BACKBONE
it wasn’t the doctors,
or the machines humming like tired insects
in the hospital dark.
it wasn’t the charts,
the cold hands,
the silver instruments pretending to know something
about pain.
no
it was the family.
the daughters with their red-rimmed eyes,
the wife holding herself together
with tape, prayer, and pure stubborn love.
they stood around that broken man
like a pack of wolves
guarding their own,
daring the world
to take one more bite.
and he felt it…
even through the drugs,
the fear,
the smashed spine that refused to listen…
he felt the gravity of them,
their strength
pressing him back into the world.
that’s the secret no one writes on prescription slips:
a man rises
not because he’s healed,
but because the people who love him
refuse
to let him stay down.
Family…
the ugly, beautiful, brutal truth of it…
is the backbone they can’t x-ray.
the thing that lifts him
long before his legs remember how.
