Poems by Rose

Against Erasure

 

I entered like a sentence written faintly,

too early for the ink to settle dry,

a line the page had nearly lost completely,

a word still wet enough to wipe aside.

 

Perhaps the hand that wrote me had been shaking.

Perhaps the paper thought I would not stay.

Yet something underneath that pale beginning

pressed deeper than the ink could fade away.

 

Years laid their hands across the manuscript.

Some crossed me out. Some crowded every line.

Some carved their anger hard into the margins

and left their heavy language over mine.

 

There were pages worn translucent from the handling,

chapters folded underneath another’s thumb,

whole passages I nearly stopped believing

were ever mine to finish or become.

 

Still, beneath each edit, I kept showing—

ghost lettering refusing to be gone.

Every hand that tried to overwrite me

pressed the first impression further on.

 

I do not need my name embossed in gold,

nor marble keeping watch above my bones.

Let history reserve its grandest volumes

for those who toppled kingdoms, changed the known.

 

I have no world-saving thing to offer.

No cure. No crown. No country bears my name.

I only outlived every rough revision

that tried to turn my sentence into shame.

 

Let others leave illuminated pages,

perfect paragraphs preserved beneath the glass.

Mine bears erasures, fingerprints, and strike-throughs—

a text that would not let itself be passed.

 

Someday time will yellow what I’ve written.

Even memory will loosen at the seams.

But hold the paper sideways to the light—

the deepest words survive beneath the ink.

 

I was never asking for the whole damn volume.

Only one small sentence time cannot amend,

pressed so deeply through the page beneath it

that even absence cannot make it end:

 

She was here.

 

Not neatly.

Not briefly.

Not by permission.

 

Indelibly.