The Hardest Part – A Sonnet

The hardest part is not that you are gone 

but how to breathe when half my shadow stays

where you abide – my grief is more than songs

of absence – it is all the vanished ways

of how I found myself within your light

and how we grew together through the days

where words unspoken in our darkest nights

became what braided two uncertain ways

into one – yes what’s gone cannot return

nor can the self that bloomed beneath your gaze –

yet what is lost remains to be discerned

in what is left of you in me that stays

and moves and grows beyond the searing pain

to bloom anew until we meet again

© Johannes W H van der Bijl 2026