Where No One Waits
2025 Poetry Marathon Mile 19
Sponsored by: Mark Toney
Contest Judged: 10/3/2025 1:17:00 PM
( 1st Place )
Written: September 27, 2025
No one calls her name
past the silent edge of her house.
No family voice calls her name.
The house is bare,
The quiet coils around her chest
heavy as a winter frost.
Empty shelves murmur back her longing.
No bread, no work,
only the rasp of breath stitching the silence
to measure the day.
The table bears a chair no one will fill…
she keeps it there
though no one comes.
It listens when she cannot speak,
it holds her secrets while the world looks past.
She cannot speak;
the streets do not bend to hear her grief.
People move past like shadows,
her sorrow clinging to the chill air,
her need folding into the city’s pulse.
Under the cloak of darkness...
she reaches for a mother long gone,
the hands that once held storms at bay,
the lullabies that stitched the dark
with tenderness.
Now even memory aches like an open wound.
And still—
each morning she rises,
pulls her body from the weight of despair,
plants her soles on the frost of morning
and begins again.
Not because it is easy,
not because someone will notice,
but because life…
even in its harshest silence…
demands she endure.
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