The Shadows Are Birds

The fates opened our hearts and stained us with fire; when finally they pulled us apart, the ashes of poetry remained.

I have often wondered what becomes of love when it leaves us.

Not the person. Not the story. But the feeling itself.

Where does it go?

I think all love leaves something behind.

Not always joy. Not always grief.

Sometimes only the strange golden residue of having been changed by another human being. A subtle rearrangement of the soul. A room within us that did not exist before.

This is why I wrote Stranded Hearts.

Because some loves become memories. Some become scars. And some become poetry.

The shadows are birds, and the birds are souls.

I have always believed that poetry changes us in ways we rarely notice at first.

A poem enters through language but leaves behind something larger than words.

For a brief moment, something within us shifts.

A door opens. A memory awakens. A truth we could not name suddenly recognizes itself.

Years later we may forget the poem entirely. We may lose the title, the author, even the lines that once moved us. Yet the transformation remains.

The poem has become part of us.

Beneath the surface, beyond memory, it continues its quiet work.

Is this why art matters?

Not because we remember it.

But because it changes us.

I have seen them before. In dreams. Beyond ruined gates where ivy swallowed stone.

Perhaps memory is stranger than we imagine.

Sometimes, just before sleep, it feels as though another world opens.

A city of towers at dusk. Ancient books resting beneath dust and candlelight. The scent of rain moving through forests older than language.

A blood-red rose pressed between forgotten pages.

And somewhere within that landscape gather all the loves we once carried.

Not lost. Only transformed.

In Stranded Hearts, love is not polite, orderly, or obedient.

It is fire. It is hunger. It is the raven watching from the edge of the garden. It is the rose opening in darkness.

It is every beautiful thing that risks breaking our hearts simply because it exists.

We are not here to preserve ourselves.

We are here to burn. To love. To create.

And maybe that is what all art asks of us.

To survive the burning.

To gather what remains.

To transform sorrow into beauty.

To discover that nothing is ever truly lost.

Not love. Not memory. Not the soul.

The shadows are birds.

The birds are souls.

And every poem is evidence that something beautiful once flew through us.

Stranded Hearts: A Dark Romantic Anthology of Love Poetry

by Gesso Cocteau © 2026