The Story: Health 2

Health I set the rule. Health II lives inside it. The panel is brighter, the bouquet more crowded, as if the day had more to count. Circles stack behind the flowers. A vase holds what the hands can still feel.

Feeling warm fingertips. Cold awaits its turn. The mind is off in thought, adding, subtracting goals, calculating survival. This is not worry dressed as wisdom. It is the ordinary arithmetic of a life: what can be kept, what must be spent, what the cold will take when its turn comes. The poem lets the cold wait. It does not pretend the cold is gone.

A sound kicks in spaces. Something old and new. Melodies caught in time. The ears do not demand answers or ask questions. Here the work turns kind. The body is not only a ledger. It is also a room where music arrives without being summoned. The ear is the one sense in the poem that refuses the bargain. It does not interrogate the day. It receives it.

Health says, non negotiable. No let's make a deal. When endings come, now becomes yesterday. No opinions tolerated. The stanza is the same as in Health I, and it should be. A pair does not rewrite the rule. It confirms it. The second panel is marked II so the first is not left alone with the terms.

Health II belongs with Body, Mind, and Soul. It is the mind calculating, and the senses still warm. Look at the color long enough and the lesson is the same as the first panel, said from the other side of the room. The day is already underway. The ear does not need to win the argument.

Collection:  Body - Mind- Soul