Rooted Ember

By Al Konda

There are loves that flash and disappear like lightning across a summer sky.

And there are loves that rise slowly — from stone, from soil, from something older than either of the two people who meet.

Rooted Ember speaks about the second kind.

This is not a poem about romance as spectacle. There are no grand rescues here, no dramatic proclamations under a collapsing sky. Instead, the poem opens quietly:

“When first you stirred inside the hush behind my ribs…”

Love begins inside the body. Behind the ribs. In the place where breath and silence meet.

It does not arrive as invasion.

It arrives as recognition.

The Fire That Was Already There

One of the most important lines in the poem is this:

“My spirit’s hearth reclaimed its native flame.”

The beloved does not create the fire. The fire was always possible. Love restores what had grown quiet.

That distinction matters.

There is a kind of love that consumes. And there is a kind that steadies. Rooted Ember chooses the second.

The ember in this poem is not borrowed fire. It is not a spark stolen from another life. It is something born — something that rises from within and becomes shared.

A Vow Beyond Time

“I swore an oath no calendar could hold.”

Romantic love often promises forever, but rarely understands what it means. This poem does not chase eternity as fantasy. Instead, it chooses something more difficult: constancy.

The calendar measures days.

The oath measures will.

The poem insists that love is not sustained by emotion alone, but by decision — repeated, deliberate, chosen.

Love Under Pressure

The poem does not pretend that sorrow will stay away.

“Let sorrow come…”

It anticipates hardship. It names winter. It names doubt. It names the possibility of fracture.

And still it claims:

“Shall teach our single lung to breathe thinned.”

This is one of the most intimate images in the poem. Two hearts, but a single breath. Not because they erase each other — but because they have grown into one shared rhythm.

This is not possession.

It is integration.

Even Death

“Not even death, that old and careful queen…”

Death is treated with seriousness. There is no mockery. No bravado. Just the steady assertion that what has fused at the level of root and breath cannot be cleanly separated.

The poem does not promise immortality.

It promises belonging.

The Ground We’ve Grown

The final image is not sky. It is soil.

“No other seed shall claim the ground we’ve grown.”

Love here is not about reaching upward. It is about sinking roots downward. About tending something that becomes impossible to uproot.

There is strength in that kind of love.

Not loud strength.

Rooted strength.

Rooted Ember is a vow spoken low. It does not demand witness. It does not ask for applause. It simply declares:

This flame was born here.

And it will remain.

Read the full poem and analysis tomorrow 23rd: https://alkonda.com/2026/02/23/rooted-ember/

© Al Konda · The Poetry Elite