She was born beneath a silence,
her first breath woven through with forgetting.
They pressed a story into her skin,
but the ink dissolved before it dried.
She drank Lethe in her mother’s arms,
unwitting, unknowing,
learning the taste of absence as nourishment.
Her lullabies were pauses,
her cradle padded with omissions.
Two fathers circled her name,
one present, one ghost,
and she was forced to walk
between the lines they would not write.
She was not stolen, not abandoned, not claimed—
but blurred.
Her life drafted in pencil,
erased and rewritten until the page itself tore.
Like Persephone, she belonged half to the light,
half to the underworld of secrets.
Like the changelings whispered of in old tongues,
she lived in a cradle not made for her,
loved and yet unloved,
present and yet unseen.
Lethe’s daughter.
A child of vanishing lines,
whose true name was washed from memory.
Still she grows.
Her roots twist in the water of forgetting,
her branches claw at a sky that does not answer.
And when the wind moves through her leaves,
it carries not words,
but the sound of a silence
too old to break.
Reade Saunders 
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