the road unravelled like a joke—and then 
the impact: glass laughing itself to pieces.
the paramedics came, tilted water to my lips
like a sacrament. later, strapped to the bed's 
cold grammar, my arms became parentheses 
 
holding nothing. the salt-trails charted their own
slow pilgrimage, silver ferns unfolding. breath fogging 
the pale ward, I learned the arithmetic of pain—
how it divides the mind from the flesh, how its 
fractured hums speak in a language without vowels. 
 
the physiotherapist said reach, hold, release,
and I did, though my back crackled with static,
that white-hot mercury pouring through my
rusted hinges, grinding the tectonic plates until
their sparks flew down the sciatic nerve.
 
then from the dark came a voice I never knew I kept: 
I am the master of my fate. old words, worn smooth 
as a pebble in the pocket. I am the captain of my soul.
the lines unspooled themselves inside, steel rods fused 
to vertebrae, vine-ladders growing strong as kauri timber.
 
others too—Rilke, Dickinson, Oliver—huddled close
like little kākā chicks in the hollows of my ribs. the poems—
the poems were alive: soft-feathered, faithful bundles of 
insistence, tails nudging me until I fed them palmfuls 
of midnight murmurs, dropping crumbs of syllables.
 
and then I walked again. it was their manuka honey
in my joints—slow gold warming the cracks. kintsugi. 
like ropes let down to the lost. I shall not live in vain.
felix culpa—the blessed breaking. I had known the words 
long before I knew they would one day know me by heart.