To cage one's own heart willingly...

I hear a kind of sorrow in that idea, someone so attuned to others that they disappear from their own care. Here’s a poem around that feeling:

There lives a soul who reads the ache

In trembling smiles that others fake,

Who hears the grief in laughter’s sound,

And kneels where silent wounds are found.

A keeper of unspoken fears,

A witness soft to hidden tears,

They gather storms from weary skies

And hold them gently, asking, “Why?”

How strange, how pitiful the art,

To know each fracture of a heart,

Yet turn no lantern to one’s own,

And make of sorrow flesh and bone.

For they will calm another’s sea,

Whilst drowning where none care to see;

Will stitch the wounds on stranger’s skin,

Yet leave their own to ache within.

They understand too much, perhaps,

The grief between affection’s gaps,

The trembling guilt, the sharpened shame,

The quiet hurt with no true name.

And so they bend, and so they stay,

To light the dark in others’ way;

Till kindness, noble though it seems,

Consumes the keeper of such dreams.

How hurting must that burden be,

To cage one’s own heart willingly,

To fear another’s smallest pain

Yet bear one’s own like endless rain.

And still, beneath compassion’s weight,

They stand beside each shattered fate,

A soul so gentle, bruised, undone,

Who saves the world, and saves not one.

What tragedy the tender know:

To love so deeply, suffer slow;

To understand the human cry,

And teach their own heart how to die.

~Ambivertsyed