The Bridge Speaks Poem by Fred Rik Kesner

Soliloquy of the Faltering Timber
(the bridge speaks)




I will speak, though I was never built for speech.
I was raised from faltering timber,
stitched together from borrowed strength
and the trembling hope that I might hold
long enough for someone to cross over,
for I was not crafted by master hands.
My beams were scavenged from half‑formed lessons,
my stones gathered from workshop laughter
that has long since fallen quiet.
I was laid across a silence
no cartographer dared to map—
a chasm carved by absence,
a river fed by unfinished stories.


The first traveller came lightly.
He carried bright contraband of dreams,
and I bowed beneath him—
not from weight,
but from reverence.
He walked as though the world beneath
might shatter at a whisper,
and for a moment
I believed I might endure.


Then came the season of merchants,
a market of murmured craft
set upon my trembling back.
Words were traded like lanterns,
sparring sold like spice,
and I became a causeway of echoes
between two distant shores.
I was never meant to be a marketplace,
but I bore it all the same.


Years passed.
The second traveller arrived
carrying a heavier cargo—
the kind that bruises the soul
long before it burdens the feet.
He stepped onto me
testing as it where, whether memory
could bear the weight of inheritance.


I creaked.
I confessed my insufficiency.
I told him I was made of
teetering timber,
seasonal mentorship,
and the faint residue
of a vanished dialect.
I told him I was never meant
to carry two griefs.


"What do you span? " he asked.
And I answered:


"I cross only the water of what‑was‑lost,
the river carved by untimely silence.
I lead not to glory,
nor to certainty,
but to a mute shore
where one traveller once stood
and where you now must stand alone."


No pilgrim rests here.
No stranger lingers.
I am only a bridge
for two travellers and their echo—
a trembling infrastructure built
to hold long enough
for one soul to reach another
before the river takes them both.


And still I hold.
Not proudly,
not perfectly—
but only to its
narrowest margin.








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