overture

She is forever immortalized on the page

The tides will not seek forgiveness when they wash away her footprints

The reeds she trampled on will right themselves

The world will forget she ever stood there

Even I will when I’m six feet under and sharing dirt with the old poets and self-righteous kings and tired corpses

The swirling brown of her eyes will be immortalized on paper, though

The ink never forgets, even when it’s smudged and the page is torn and old

We’ll be wandering Elysium but the curve of her brow will be etched into history

So don’t you see?

I’m glad I wrote the story down

Shaking hands and clammy palms gripping a pen and scrawling her name a hundred times on the back of a Post-it note

Splintered consonants and fused vowels

All putting into words what I’ll never say out loud

We’ll be forgotten, but the stories won’t

To me, at least

Human evolution at its finest form is the passing down of knowledge to future generations

So that someone in another lifetime remembers

And I hope they remember her