The poem feels like someone trying to hold the overwhelming tenderness of love without letting it spill out and expose everything they’re afraid to reveal. Brooks captures that trembling, deeply human place where love softens you, stretches you, makes the world feel suddenly shared where even a red bird or a blue sky becomes something you experience through another’s eyes. There’s a raw vulnerability in the way the speaker can’t look at him because her own pulse would betray her; desire becomes a truth the body can’t hide. And when he leaves, her arms turning to water feels heartbreakingly real that strange mix of longing, emptiness, and freedom that love leaves behind. Calling love a “beautiful half of a golden hurt” is the kind of honesty only someone who has lived it can write: love as radiance and wound at once. The poem understands how fragile we become when we care, how terrifying it is to speak that truth aloud, and how easily the magic can collapse into something ordinary. It’s love at its most human bright, aching, and impossible to contain.
The poem feels like someone trying to hold the overwhelming tenderness of love without letting it spill out and expose everything they’re afraid to reveal. Brooks captures that trembling, deeply human place where love softens you, stretches you, makes the world feel suddenly shared where even a red bird or a blue sky becomes something you experience through another’s eyes. There’s a raw vulnerability in the way the speaker can’t look at him because her own pulse would betray her; desire becomes a truth the body can’t hide. And when he leaves, her arms turning to water feels heartbreakingly real that strange mix of longing, emptiness, and freedom that love leaves behind. Calling love a “beautiful half of a golden hurt” is the kind of honesty only someone who has lived it can write: love as radiance and wound at once. The poem understands how fragile we become when we care, how terrifying it is to speak that truth aloud, and how easily the magic can collapse into something ordinary. It’s love at its most human bright, aching, and impossible to contain.
When he
Shuts a door—
Is not there—
Your arms are water.
Oh my! I'm just a puddle now.
Awwww, that was such a sweet poem, I was really hoping for a happy ending!!!! Great work anyway!
‘…free / With a ghastly freedom / …the beautiful half / Of a golden hurt.’ So perfect! Thank you Svetlana. 🙏💚