MARIA H. THOMPSON

 

 

Beyond The Glass

 

“The glass offers a ghost; the threshold demands a soul.”

 

Harm arrives already shaped,

already practiced.

It knows the weight we carry.

 

It claims no rightful power,

resembles what we refuse,

becomes a timeless worry.

 

Anger, left to rot,

merges with the ghost

we try to exorcise.

 

We steady the blade.

Not to blunt the strike—

to keep it from shattering the light.

 

The mirror reveals

urgency eclipsing mercy.

It has no hands to swing a door,

or shield the broken.

 

We cannot retreat inward

and call it holy.

We stand.

Unfinished.

Burning.

 

Before It Has a Name

 

“What we endure unnamed

shapes us most precisely.”

 

She sits alone,

but not abandoned.

Grass gathers around her

like quiet arms—

an unspoken covenant with the earth.

 

Above,

the moon keeps its distance,

constant,

unalarmed by human longing.

 

This is not fear.

It is initiation.

The discipline of waiting

without demand.

 

Her posture speaks

before her face can:

knees drawn inward,

body curved around something unseen—

not concealment,

but protection

of what has not yet been spoken.

 

She is learning,

without instruction,

that solitude does not diminish her.

It clarifies.

 

The world is vast.

It does not reorganize itself

around desire.

Light does not move

at the pace of need.

 

It arrives

according to its own order.

This is the threshold

before grief acquires a name,

before longing understands

its own gravity.

 

Innocence does not disappear.

It shifts position—

no longer unquestioned,

not yet disillusioned.

 

She begins to understand

that presence is not proximity,

that love is not arrival,

that distance can instruct

without cruelty.

 

Becoming begins here:

in stillness,

in the quiet agreement

to witness

what is—

without fear.

 

MARIA H. THOMPSON

 

MARIA H. THOMPSON is a Canadian poet and writer whose work explores resilience, healing, and the quiet courage required to begin again. She is the author of Friday Night Poetry and Unexpected Gifts, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies. Born to Polish immigrants and raised as one of nine children, Maria’s early life instilled in her a profound respect for family, cultural heritage, and endurance. These formative influences continue to shape the emotional and philosophical terrain of her writing. Her poetry engages the complexities of ordinary life, revealing beauty within hardship and meaning within struggle. She describes poetry as a reflective descent into the soul—an attempt to articulate both individual experience and shared human emotion with clarity and restraint. Maria is also the founder of the Friday Night Poetry Group, an international community dedicated to fostering creative expression, mutual support, and healing through the written word.