This is not a poem

This is not a poem.

However much it may be

that words may witness,

this is not a poem.

Witness lives lost, wasted,

ground to dust, witness with words,

but that will not make

this poem.

Voices may cry out,

as poems sometimes do,

for justice, for approximations

of mercy, but this is not a cry.

This is merely the soft sound

a mind may make

when it has gotten used

to the converging unquiet.

This is the moment

when you cannot hear me

and the moment

when I cannot hear me.

It is the moment

before the cry,

before the words,

before the poem.

This is the moment

when the pencil

makes the sound

of stitching wounds.

This is the moment

before healing begins,

the moment

that healing begins.