A Poet's Heart

My fingers trace the worn lines of a page, ink bleeding into the fibers like memories. They say a poet’s heart is a fragile thing, a bird with wings too delicate for the storm. But mine, oh mine, has weathered gales that would have shredded lesser souls. Each verse, a shard of glass I’ve polished until it gleams, reflecting the shattered fragments of a life lived on the edge of a precipice.

Here, in the quiet hum of Greenchase, where the air still whispers tales of its past, I find my voice. It’s not the voice of the girl who said “I do” at seventeen, her eyes wide with a naive hope that would soon be choked by the weeds of reality. It’s not the voice of the mother, her arms aching with a love she didn’t know how to give, her heart a battlefield of exhaustion and fear. It’s not the voice of the woman who clung to a cheating husband, hoping his returning touch would mend the cracks he himself had made. And it’s certainly not the voice of the woman who, blinded by a sister’s reckless offering, tumbled into the abyss of meth, trading one darkness for a far more consuming one.

This voice, this poet’s voice, is forged in the fires of betrayal, tempered by the blows of an abusive hand, and stained with the bitter residue of addiction. It’s a voice that has known the cold, hard concrete of the street, the hollow echo of a jail cell, and the suffocating weight of a life lived under someone else’s thumb. It’s the voice that learned to smile through tears, to nod when her spirit screamed, to disappear into herself to survive.