A different silence
This is not the one of the heart of the night,
when an orchestra of crickets and frogs is the only
harmony your comfy bed can warm you with —
In place of the old soprano of your maltreated mother.
It is quieter, with a hundred rueful voices.
It is not the one —the habitual —thirteen years you’ve heard the
sobs and growls and yells and loud cries…
That brutality that washed your eyes while you jittered
in a cold corner, with your shin kissing your knee.
It ended with a cold body and a hundred sirens.
Everything has happened quickly, and the moon had quit rivers,
The ones that floated sweet reminiscences to your doorstep —
A warm pizza and a wide mama–smile.
It is lost to the chasing breeze that sneaks through your cold, silent room.
All you hear is acrimony—of your father’s and you/a family torn apart with its hands baring before a scalding sun of conflicting emotions, with tears that blame and numbs the world around you—
In a hundred screaming resonances.
————
Poem © U.A. Edwardson
Image by Shadesofnate from Pixabay (cropped)