I Wait For The Wind

 They thought I would drown

in the first deep pull of it—

mud thick like memory,

bayou breath pressing against ribs

that once caved in easy.

They did not know

that I was born

where the swamp sings low,

where frogs speak prophecy

and quicksand tests your patience

before your strength.

I do not move like they do.

I feel the ground before I ask it to hold me.

I wait for wind.

I walk like the trees taught me—

slow, rooted, listening.

They saw me as soft,

a wildflower tucked in the folds

between hard-risen mountains.

But I was never delicate.

I was defiant in bloom.

No one planted me.

Still, I grew—

through rot,

through flood,

through the dry ache of years

that gave nothing

but asked everything.

I am not the peak carved by thunder.

I am the hush between

the valley that remembers,

the petal that stays open

even when the sky forgets kindness.

Call me mud-born.

Call me root-fed.

Call me what survives

in places others drown.

I have known decay

as a slow teacher.

I have worn silence

like second skin.

But beneath every storm,

my marrow kept singing.

And still..

I rise.

Not polished,

not spared,

but whole in a way

only the weathered know.

These rings?

They are not just years.

They are testaments.

I do not tell you I was strong.

I show you in the way I bend,

in the way I hold.

I am the bloom they forgot to count.

The breath that returned

after stillness.

The woman shaped by grit,

held by roots,

and baptized

in the deep, knowing mud.