Reflection’s Amorphous Language

She stands in the upright center of the room
peeling potatoes that seem to bleed their own pale light,
moons shed of orbit, spiraling toward the floor
where they flicker like messages meant
for a different family entirely.

The window is a gray of gray of gray again,
a layered quiet,
and outside the fences bend inward
as if listening for a forgotten password.

Snow creatures, thin as breath, quick as regret,
perform lacework dances
only visible in the instant you look away,
their choreography unraveling the winter
into drifting, crystalline riddles.

In this room, the pots hum among themselves,
muttering old oaths in cast iron dialects.
Beets bleed purple geography.
Roots divide into green constellations.
The potatoes, obedient to the blade,
become small white islands
tossed into primordial waters,
slice slice
plop plop,
as if creation were beginning again
in a pot no larger than childhood.

From the back room
a kettle shrieks in bird language,
calling the mason jar leaves to resurrection.
The dry fragments rustle in their glass
like tiny prophets in cramped quarters:
take me
take me
we can bloom again if only given heat.

Steam halos the cup set before me,
its soldered edge a soft horizon
warping under the breath of summer ghosts.
Mother’s warning,half prayer, half spell,
keeps my small hands from learning
the sharp grammar of burn.

Across the room, father studies the smoke-dried meat
hanging in its jar like stoic guardians,
thin warriors who have forgotten their tribes
but still remember loyalty.

We gather around the table
choosing, tasting, pretending
these domestic victories are enough
to hold the larger hungers at bay.

Someone, maybe all of us, whispers a prayer
that folds itself into the bib of silence,
a quiet so complete
even the chairs seem to kneel.

Her apron-dried hands descend,
ladling out warmth as the world continues
its distant, tireless performance:
wind sabers cutting invisible arcs,
ice shards auditioning on windowpanes,
nature rehearsing the same wild ballet
that began long before any of us were named.

And through all of it
the child I was,
quiet-eyed, half hidden,
listened to voices that arrived
without sound or permission,
voices that tunneled inward
season after season
building themselves
into a language rooted deeper than memory,
a forest of unspoken things
Soundless words that would one day answer back
as words of a poet.