Silence

Some days her guts were threateningly bare-
not a syllable, not a sound,
wandering – she does her cooking and her cleaning
and not a voice inside her;
the threatening silence.
She dreams of children with far away fathers:
and mothers content without their men
and of a world with pipes and pans –
streching out their climbs
she watched as some fell satiated;
and others broke their backs.
Alone sometimes with dead men,
she scrapes the bottom of her guts
to find some words, some spring,
from her darkness,
from her deep,
from a world she never quite knows
and hope the words
bear away her silence.