I can't believe I missed this lovely piece!

I think it's one of my favorites from you, now. It would be beautiful read aloud, too. The unexpected rhyme here was smoooth:

"And our hearts continued to beat
sending oxygen to our feet,"

^ These two lines also reminded me of "Holding on to you", a song by twenty one pilots where there is a stanza: "Is it time to move our feet/ to an introspective beat/ It ain't the speakers that bump hard/ It's our hearts that make the beat"

There was such clarity and symmetry in this piece, I don't know if that makes sense but especially with the mention of change in "the heat, the cold, the hail, the snow, the dust" then later when conveying emotions "the hope, the joy, the loss, the loneliness". A fantastic correlation and relatable, too.

This poem gave me that "bigger than you and me" feeling. The temperatures fluctuating and bringing us back to all who we hope to be, who we are at the core, and what exactly we will do we with our next breath, our next footprint.

The last stanza made me feel so grounded, especially in the "quiet dedication", because I saw that as a reminder of the times we continue, though we feel broken down. The times where we can't exemplify our strength in bold ways but in quiet ways.

Reading again, I think there's an overuse of punctuation, especially semi-colons, but that's just a preference really. I don't think it's grammatically incorrect, but the first and the longer (third?) stanza already had a good narrative, I question if there needs to be so much punctuation.

Lovely reading, as always, Tanya!