Dove

The dove is not ascending,
it rests, barely, in human hands,
as if asking whether peace can survive being held at all.

The image is worn, smeared, almost erased,
peace here is not a triumph, but a residue,
something that remains, not because it was protected, but because it was not yet lost.

To mint this work on January 1st is not to mark a beginning, but to acknowledge a threshold,
a moment suspended between memory and intention,
where tradition names the day, but the image refuses certainty.

This is a post painting,
not an answer, but an exposure,
moving through signal and silence, gesture and decay,
holding nothing in place but the possibility of care.

What’s offered is not peace as promise, but peace as burden,
as weight, as question,
and perhaps, as the last thing we dare to carry into the future.