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Sofia Aronovsky Poem
The Garden
Dear Jane,
They will tell you a woman is a flower,
as though her worth lives in the bloom,
in how softly she opens,
in how carefully she keeps her petals.
I fear someone has plucked yours.
One by one,
until you looked down
and wondered if there was enough of you left
to still be called a flower.
I fear they damaged the soil beneath you,
pressed their weight into the earth,
left you searching for the sun
and wondering why you could no longer feel its warmth.
But Jane,
look around.
You are still in the garden.
There are flowers here without petals.
Flowers bent toward the earth.
Flowers blooming wildly.
Flowers that have forgotten what spring feels like.
Some are only stems.
Still,
the garden does not ask them
to prove they are flowers.
The bees will come and go.
The butterflies will land
and leave.
Let them.
A flower was never made beautiful
because something chose to visit it.
And autumn will come.
We will lose petals.
We will change color.
We will lean into one another
when the light begins leaving earlier.
Some of us will bloom.
Some of us will wither.
Most of us will do both.
But even a flower with nothing left to give
still belongs to the earth.
So if you cannot find the sun right now,
Jane,
borrow ours.
There is room beside us
for the woman you were,
the woman you are,
and whoever grows from here.
You do not need your petals back
to belong in this garden.
You never left it.
— Sofia Aronovsky
Copyright © Sofia Aronovsky | Year Posted 2026
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Sofia Aronovsky Poem
I used to think peace would feel good.
I thought I would recognize it
when it came.
I did not know
how uncomfortable quiet could be
when you have spent so long listening
for something to go wrong.
There is nothing wrong tonight.
I keep checking.
No footsteps are getting heavier,
no change in someone's voice,
no face I have to study
before deciding what mine should look like.
The room is still.
The kind of still
I used to ask for.
And now that I have it,
I don't know what to do with my hands.
I don't know what peace feels like.
I only know how to pretend I feel it.
I know how to sit still
while my mind keeps moving.
I know how to say I'm resting
while counting everything
I should be doing instead.
I know how to lie in bed
and turn rest into another thing
I am failing at.
Even doing nothing
feels like doing something wrong.
My body fights the quiet.
It has spent too long learning
that quiet means something is coming.
So when nothing comes,
it does not relax.
It waits.
Sometimes tranquility feels like
finally putting everything down
and still feeling the weight
in your hands.
Your fingers stay curled
around something that isn't there.
You know you can let go.
Your body doesn't.
Not because you want
to carry it again,
but because carrying something
gave your hands a purpose.
And now they are empty.
You spent so long asking
for someone to take the weight
that you never wondered
what you would do with your hands
once they did.
Chaos gives you something to do.
Something to fix.
Something to prepare for.
Something to survive.
But peace asks nothing of you.
And somehow,
that is harder.
Because who am I
when nothing needs fixing?
What do I do with a body
that does not know
how to be a body?
What if I am always almost resting,
almost present,
almost okay?
I am afraid of waking up years from now
and realizing nothing was chasing me, but I ran anyway.
Maybe I have spent so long
measuring peace
by the distance between disasters
that I never learned
what peace was on its own.
Maybe I only know peace
by what it is not.
But if peace is only
the absence of chaos,
what is left
when the chaos is gone?
What does quiet become
when I stop waiting
for something to break it?
There is nothing wrong tonight.
I am safe enough
to do nothing.
And I am terrified
that I will never learn how.
Copyright © Sofia Aronovsky | Year Posted 2026
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Sofia Aronovsky Poem
Dear Jane
Dear Jane,
It’s not your fault, whatever they may say.
Your choices never gave your rights away.
It’s okay to drink, to celebrate, to choose.
It’s okay to wear what you want without excuse.
It’s okay to trust, to let somebody near.
It’s okay to feel your anger, grief, and fear.
It’s okay to question those you trusted then.
It’s okay to question what you knew back when.
None of these things were invitations to take.
None of your choices made your boundaries theirs to break.
What you could not give, they had no right to take.
What was always yours was never theirs to break.
Your compass may be clouded by the doubt,
By everything that taught you to shut your instincts out.
Your memory may return in fragments, unclear,
While pieces once forgotten slowly reappear.
A line was crossed, though some deny the line,
Because admitting boundaries means we must define
Why women are so often made to defend
The boundaries that were always theirs from start to end.
A woman and her body belong to herself,
Not something to be claimed by anybody else.
Not to anyone who desires to possess,
Not to the space between silence and yes.
They may have tried to make you doubt your voice,
Your certainty, your right to make a choice.
But we shrill shrews will stand beside you, stone by stone,
And remind you that you were always your own.
They take and take and still expect compliance,
We stand together and answer with defiance.
They forget, before they learned to take from one,
They first came from a woman, every one.
A cry for justice will not disappear,
A revolt against oppression draws us near.
We are listening. We are watching without fear.
We are moving. We are here.
And when they ask our voices to disappear,
We are here. We are here. We are here.
— Sofia Aronovsky
Copyright © Sofia Aronovsky | Year Posted 2026
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Sofia Aronovsky Poem
Written in My Hand
Grief is loud.
It cries until your body hurts.
It screams into empty rooms.
It asks why
until the word means nothing.
It makes you angry
at people who are still here.
It makes you miss things
you thought you hated.
But grief is quiet too.
Sometimes it sits beside you
while you laugh.
Sometimes you have a good day
and feel guilty for having one.
Sometimes you forget.
And then you remember.
And somehow,
remembering hurts worse
than never forgetting at all.
Grief is a ghostwriter.
It writes things inside you
that you don't remember asking it to write.
It changes the way you remember before.
It changes the way you imagine after.
It makes absence feel like a presence.
And after a while,
you stop asking grief to leave.
You make room for it.
Maybe because losing it
would mean losing one more thing.
So it stays.
Quiet enough that no one else hears it.
Loud enough that you always do.
And somewhere along the way,
it learns to write in your hand.
Until one day you read yourself back
and cannot tell
where grief ends
and you begin.
— Sofia Aronovsky
Copyright © Sofia Aronovsky | Year Posted 2026
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Sofia Aronovsky Poem
The Things We Don’t Inherit
We inherited warnings before we understood the danger,
rules whispered from one woman to another.
Hold your keys between your fingers.
Watch your drink. Don’t walk home alone.
We inherited apologies for taking up space,
and the instinct to make ourselves smaller.
We inherited stories told carefully,
as though the truth might break in our mouths.
I wonder how many women before us
wanted to leave something different.
Not the fear.
Not the shame someone else put in their hands.
Maybe what we leave behind can be a door
the next woman does not have to force open.
A boundary already given a name.
A voice that makes hers easier to find.
I cannot choose everything that was left in me.
Some things become scars before we can refuse them.
But I can choose what I leave in you.
And you can choose what you leave in her.
They left us a fight.
I want us to leave each other.
— Sofia Aronovsky
Copyright © Sofia Aronovsky | Year Posted 2026
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