Where the Weeds Sang Louder

 I was born where rivers split —

between bone and blood,

between names that never spoke the same language

but still fed the same trees.

One side came polished,

wearing history like ironed linen —

straight lines, mapped lands,

a paper-bound god tucked into its vest.

The other side whispered —

earth-tongued,

weather-stained,

wearing the wind like a shawl,

offering prayers without punctuation.

They fought, those bloodlines —

not with spears,

but with silence,

with rules carved into dining tables

and memories swept beneath polished floors.

I learned early to walk like a fence line,

steady, silent, unmoved by the pull of either pasture.

But my heart —

my heart grew wild like yarrow in a cracked foundation,

finding bloom where no gardener dared look.

The louder side claimed dominion,

spoke in titles and church bells,

in porcelain dishes we weren’t allowed to touch.

But the quieter side —

the one with dirt under its nails

and stories folded into corn husks —

that side sang to me in the hush of dusk.

They are the ones who taught me

that thunder is just the sky clearing its throat,

that grief can look like sage smoke rising

and healing can sound like a drumbeat echoing off canyon walls.

I am not a battlefield.

I am not the treaty they never signed.

I am what happens when warring winds

meet over still water

and choose not to rage,

but to ripple.

Call me daughter of the hush,

keeper of berry stains and broken rules,

the one who walked out of fire

not scorched —

but colored red and copper,

a soft rebellion made flesh.

And though the world handed me

a census with boxes I never fit,

I have always known:

the roots they buried grow strongest in the dark.

So now, I speak for the side

they tried to prune,

whose tongues were folded into silence —

but oh, how loud the weeds can sing

when you let them.