The Woman Beneath The Woman

Mmmmm There is a woman beneath the woman The one the world sees The one who learned to walk carefully The one who held whole seasons of herself Out of view Beneath her lies the quieter one The one who never forgot The language of the body The one who felt the shift in the room before any word rose to meet it The one who understood The cost of softness long before she could name it She is the keeper Of every small tightening in the chest Every quiet bracing beneath the ribs Every moment the breath Chose silence over release Not as a catalogue of wounds But as a map Of how she continued There are gestures you no longer notice The slight lifting of the shoulders The way the spine bends inward As if sheltering a story That has not yet found its sound These are not flaws These are traces of the woman who endured When endurance was the only way forward And somewhere beneath all of that Is the one rising now Not quickly Not in a blaze But in the slow way Earth lifts new shoots through winter soil A quiet unfurling A returning of what was scattered She does not hurry She does not demand She remembers,

She remembers everything The way light once fell across a younger face The way a heart once opened before it learned caution The way belonging once felt before the world asked her To earn it She is not returning To who she was before She was She is becoming who she has always been Beneath the versions she carried to survive Nothing in her asks for apology Nothing in her begs to be smaller She is shaped by the very things that tried to undo her And she carries them quietly The way the earth carries storms beneath its surface This is not a rise It is a remembering A settling into the woman whose breath no longer hides Whose spine no longer folds Whose presence enters a room Without asking permission To exist