the woman with ancient eyes cradles her rosy-cheeked daughter,
wide-eyed and bursting with the innocence of the youth--
she is a tenement child, raised gracefully in the shadowed slums of her father's mistakes,
wears a tattered dress, spinning alone in a whirlwind of dust mites and silenced laughter.
and when she hears tales of the children with taffeta dresses and China dolls, she
smiles--
out of love, replacing envy with euphoric contentment, because
she has her mama's eyes, the voices
of the fatherless children
singing along to her same song,
shouting cries of hope against the crumbling walls
of a broken world she is beginning to heal.