The Pilgrim
The woman walks—barefoot, blistered—
To Caminho, clutching her kitten like a relic.
She has no roof but the sky’s indifferent mouth,
No bread but the breath of her own undoing.
She does not beg.
She becomes.
The thorn-path splits her soles like prophecy,
And every ache baptizes her bones.
She is not homeless—
She is haloed in absence.
The road does not wind.
It wounds.
And still she walks—
The kitten a purring rosary against her chest,
Her shadow cast long like a saint's refusal.
---
They called her a woman of ruin,
With hair like untamed scripture
And eyes that swallowed birds mid-flight.
But ruin is a kind of altar,
And she has learned to pray by burning.
---
No one told her the mountain was a mirror.
It showed her back the girl she buried
Under blankets of apology,
The girl who swallowed her voice to survive.
Now, her silence rings louder than bells.
---
The kitten mews—
Not hungry, but holy.
She drinks dew from her wrist like communion.
She names no god but her own breath.
She names herself
A temple of thorn and milk and salt.
---
At night, the stars speak
In the grammar of ghosts.
She listens.
She listens with her scars.
And each wound becomes a window—
A soft pane of light in her ribs.
---
By dawn, her feet are gardens.
Her steps bloom wild violets in the dust.
She is not arriving.
She is becoming the path.
And Caminho—
That fabled hush, that storied edge—
Is no longer a place,
But a verb lodged in her chest:
To Caminho
Is to turn the absence of shelter
Into a shrine made of skin and vow.
To Caminho
Is to walk until walking becomes prayer.
To Caminho
Is to die without dying—
And wake inside your own name.