she has taken up dancing

 

she thinks of suicide
as a lost art.

she wakes to write a poem, her face
is not listening to her and it is
smiling.

she touches her daughter’s sleeping limbs,

feels love like a tidal wave, picks up a boulder,
rises to greet it;

it is May and the tree outside her window is bare,
she begins singing out loud.

she speaks in French,
she has never heard the words, but
reading them from the page, they sound like
birds taking flight.