Listening

I ask you what illness you bring,
you offer a whole life:
thirteen years old,
hands too small to hold bottles,
yet steady enough to raise sisters
while your mother bled silently.

You say "anxiety,"
I hear generations —
brothers demanding uniforms washed,
a girl child playing mother,
without rest.
You call yourself a whirling dervish;
I see survival dancing
into the shape of adulthood.

You say "depression,"
and tell me of betrayal,
a husband who alphabetized his affairs,
grief cutting deep,
led me to love again.
I feel the resilience in your levity,
in that which is left unsaid.

Your prescriptions are a tangled basket
of threads,
every tablet another strand
that must be carefully sorted and stitched into place—
names threaded
through decades of sleepless nights.

Yet it is not prescriptions you hunger for,
but rest. Just a single day
of being still without guilt.
You quilt for veterans,
you dream of stitching hope
into the blankets of foster children
sent adrift with nothing but trash sacks.
You still chase purpose as if
time itself was a stern father urging you on.

What you fear most
can’t be sewn back together:
a brilliant son fractured by drugs and delusions,
a daughter who talks but does not hear,
and a youngest son hiding behind silence.

I am meant to ask questions,
I listen instead,
Within me grows the ache
of how much you’ve carried,
how few casseroles and prayer lists
have been offered for the burdens of your soul.

You call your illness embarrassing.
I want to tell you it is not.
I want to tell you what you’ve carried
is more than many could survive.
Instead, I take notes slowly,
grateful you trust me with your story
that is not illness,
but a testament.