She wore hunger like a shadow
that whispered of what was not there—
but she held it,
her shoulders
never quite bending.
She wrapped us close,
tightened the circle,
and in the quiet of those moments,
taught us that survival could taste like sweetness
even when the world was a desert.
Four children,
each carrying the mark of a different man,
but none of us carried more
than the weight of her love.
She danced in the dark,
and we followed,
not knowing
how deep the cracks in her skin went—
how her bones carried the scars
of battles fought with fists,
words that bruised in silence,
love that was both a weapon and a shield.
And when the lights went out,
she didn’t let us see the dark.
She made it a game,
the flicker of candles
casting ghosts that we could laugh with,
ice cream sundaes dripping with hope
where there should have been tears.
Her hands, though worn and trembling,
made something out of nothing—
something we could hold onto
when there was nothing else to grasp.
She was a storm in a house of glass,
crashing, breaking,
but never surrendering.
Her pain was the silent kind,
the kind you could taste in the air,
but still, she loved
with the fierceness of a world
she thought would swallow her whole.
And we never saw the weight of her wings—
the way they were clipped,
but still, she flew.
She said, Forgive me,
but how could we?
We only saw the strength
in the way she kept walking,
kept trying,
even when her footsteps echoed
against walls that never stopped whispering
of things she could never forget.
She wasn’t broken.
She was the quiet hum
of a river running
beneath everything—
underground, unseen,
but always moving.
She didn’t need forgiveness.
She needed us to see her,
not as a woman bent by the weight
of the world she couldn’t control,
but as the one who held us all
and made sure we breathed,
even when she couldn’t