Image courtesy of: https://pixels.com/featured/lonely-woman-maya-n.html

 

I know a lonely woman

She hides behind her book thumping faith

I know a lonely woman

She lives vicariously through her children

infantilizing and sheltering them

from the world’s wicked ways.

I know a lonely woman

She is pretending perfect piety

I know a lonely woman

I see her simmering suffering

  I know a lonely woman

She is relentlessly religious

I know a lonely woman

I see the insecurity beneath the striving

I know a lonely woman

She did the “right thing”

I know a lonely woman

She married to cover her “sin”

  I know a lonely woman

But does she know herself?

Day 4: I opened up my bedside journal and found  the start of this poem, very rough. I wrote those ideas last September.  Somehow even this piece is not quite the whole story, but it does reveal some of her.