A SISTERLY CONFESSION.

Starved for all
you have excluded
from your life,
you confide how
loneliness and misery
overcomes you in closed rooms.

In funereal black for our father,
your skin stretched tight
across your forehead,
like an immigrant ancestor
accustomed to deprivation—

You tell me that nothing I tell you
can make your life better.
You don’t want advice,
but what is rarer—sympathy.

Sometimes, with others,
I notice that something pent-up
from under great pressure
rushes out of you,

and your voice is like a waterfall
trying to drown out
the threatening world
in the cocoon of your own sound.