How I became a poetess

It began with a whisper I wrote to myself in the dark.

Not for anyone to read,

not even for memory

just to keep the ache from hardening.

I wrote of the way silk clings to skin

and how loneliness hums at the edge of laughter.

I wrote until words bled softer than wounds

and metaphors grew where silence had lived.

The world never asked me for poetry.

It asked for smiles, for beauty, for service.

But I gave it poems instead,

hidden in gestures,

woven into glances,

slipped between the lines of what I was allowed to say.

And when they finally noticed,they thought it was a performance

as if a woman could speak so tenderly without trying to seduce.

But I wrote not to be desired,

only to survive.

That is how I became a poetess.

by bleeding quietly

and calling it art