The Woman and the Horizon - A Poem of Self Discovery

 

The Woman and the Horizon

Behind her, the shore dissolved into foam and then nothingness —
a place she’d lived, but never quite belonged to.
Names, duties, expectations… all thinning
like miasma carried away on a cruel wind.
Abandoned, with purpose.

She learned this new sea by increments —
the tilt of a deck, the hush before a swell,
the way silence can chafe more deeply than sound.
Each hour unstitched another thread of who she’d been,
and she let it fall, ungrieved, into the dark water,
to float away and be unseen, especially by herself.
Abandoned, with purpose.

The days lengthened into a kind of quiet reckoning —
the sea offering no comfort, only clarity,
its vastness pressing her into the shape she’d avoided becoming.
What remained of her old self clung like salt to her skin,
and she washed it away without ceremony,
letting the tide claim what she no longer needed,
replaced by new seasoning, and somewhat painfully, new skin,
abrased and changed, with purpose.

The horizon met her without welcome or warning —
a thin, indifferent line that suggested nothing
yet revealed everything she had tried not to admit.
It stretched before her like a truth too simple to deny,
a place where the self she’d resisted stood waiting,
unpatiently patient, eager as the breaking dawn,
and she stepped toward it, raw but unafraid,
drawn forward with purpose.
She was not new, she was revised, and refined.
yet was still at her core, herself.
She drew closer to herself, with purpose.

The sea calmed beneath her as if recognizing
a steadiness inside from what she’d scoured clean and raw.
No revelation waited at the docking, no grand unveiling —
only the tranquility of a self no longer ripped asunder by doubt.
She stood at the rail, the wind threading through her,
and felt her world align without fan, or fare, or ceremony,
as if the horizon had simply stepped aside
to let her pass into the life she’d been circling for years.
Not claimed, not conquered — simply met.
She moved forward, wholly, fully with purpose,
And she met herself — for the first time, once again.

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Copyright January 2026 M. W. Van Dyke
All Rights Reserved