For Maya: A Girl My Age
Maya:
For Maya
A girl my age.
A girl the age I was
when I first saw her story.
I was a girl vacationing in Cape Cod with my family.
She was a girl in St. Louis Missouri
On a television screen,
but real as life
for a girl my age
watching a girl my age with a family,
be taken
but not destroyed.
A girl my age stopped talking for years
but never stopped communicating.
A girl my age went away
yet never left.
A girl my age
returned with words overflowing
returned with wisdom
never knowing
how she would shape the world,
returned with her own life
in her own hands
and her own voice.
A girl my age,
long since a woman
now passed on
and newly reborn
in the voices of women like me,
who spin silence into power.
-ZG