> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.journal.ninthheaven.co/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# When the Body Breaks
- URL: https://www.journal.ninthheaven.co/literature/poem-when-the-body-breaks/
- Published: 2025-09-20T04:56:50.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-13T15:26:23.000Z
- Description: When the Body Breaks” explores physical illness as a spiritual unraveling that nonetheless makes space for reverence. This poem exists in the tension between alienation and awe, asking what it means to carry pain with dignity and whether the soul’s transformations might be holy in their fragility
- Author: Abel Saldana
- Tags: Literature & Poetry, Poetry, #Import 2025-10-08 13:07

**When the Body Breaks**  
*by Abel Saldana*  
  
It began, I think, in August—   
though perhaps it was April,   
that season where time loses its sharpness,   
and illness, without apology,   
slips past the calendar’s boundaries,   
untethered by date or expectation.  
  
It crept in slowly,   
like a cunning intruder   
testing the looseness of a window latch,   
then dragging its weight   
across the freshly swept floors   
of the body I had tried so carefully   
to keep in order.  
  
It was a cold at first,   
or maybe a flu—   
one of those ordinary sicknesses   
we pretend we are prepared for—   
until it became something else entirely,   
a fever that sank its heat   
deep into the chambers of breath and bone,   
turning familiar terrain   
into something hostile,   
and every cough   
into a reckoning.  
  
There was nothing metaphorical   
about the pain,   
nothing poetic   
about the fatigue—   
but still,   
there was the undeniable sense   
that some sanctity had been violated.  
  
The body I once treated   
as sacred ground,   
with rituals of care   
and whispered affirmations,   
felt suddenly like a temple   
whose walls had crumbled—   
its mantras drowned   
beneath the corrosion   
gathering at the joints,   
its inner sanctum   
overrun by fire.  
  
And yet—   
there is a strange,   
unexpected comfort   
in the aftermath of such breaking.  
  
When the storm finally passes—   
as all storms do—   
you return to the ruins   
to find not absence,   
but scaffolding still upright,   
steel struts still rooted,   
and in the cracks,   
the fragile bloom   
of something unshaken.  
  
So I come back to myself,   
not as I was before,   
but as something more reverent,   
more aware of the miracle   
that is continued breath,   
continued motion—   
knowing now   
that illness cannot render me unworthy,   
cannot erase what is intrinsic.  
  
It can only remind me,   
in its cruel and aching way,   
how holy this body was—   
how holy it remains,   
even in fracture,   
even in fragments.