Her Voice
She has the prettiest French accent in Canada,
But now that I’m in France
I’ve come to find she has the prettiest accent in the world.
Perhaps it’s the way she moves her lips,
How she never bites her tongue,
And how she locks words behind her teeth
Until she finds a moment
Worthy of setting them free.
It’s how she pauses,
The growth of my yearning when she does,
As though I was the breath she kept
Guarded in her chest.
Her voice is an exhale,
A sigh.
The brightest red in a field of poppies,
The prettiest face in a world of vanity.
She is one of many
Though many could never amount to one unlike all.
A saying goes
“We love those we’ve invested most time into.”
Then how is it the first time I heard her speak
I knew
That though the person before me was a stranger,
And I had deemed romance a dead language,
Her voice was the closest thing
To love that I’ve ever heard.
Rain
Your eyes don’t shine like they used to
As if the twinkle in your eye is a sun
Setting into the horizon of your heart
And I barely make you smile anymore.
I see the tears you hold.
How they puddle in your tear ducts
And how you swallow them like the words
You’re too scared to say.
I wish I could make you cry
Then maybe I could drain you of this pain.
Maybe if the sun hadn’t any water to drown in
She’d shine forever.
Maybe I could take the pain so we could be together.
Maybe I’m the puddle your eyes drown in —
Every night
Since you’ve been gone, it has rained.
Every night since you have gone I have refrained
From telling you I love you so much it makes me cry.
If you knew I loved you so much maybe you’d know why.
I’d take your tears as mine, and I’d make like the sky.
Every day I would rain
If it meant I could see the sun shine in you
Just for a moment.
Can we make the pain stop?
Mellowdramma is a Haitian-Canadian slam poet based in Montreal. She believes that art is a medicine that allows people to connect with their emotions, others, and the parts of ourselves that rarely see the light.
Featured image by Noah Siliman on Unsplash.
