Words That Wound by Ariel S. Maloney

Little Rock School, by Will Counts, 1957.

Words that Wound
                
One mouth frozen
twisted with such hate
it becomes obscene
like a snake about to reel
and devour itself again.
 
Her words have been forgotten
but they have no less power
to wound–the words thrown
like a dagger:
 
                 the words that prompt
                 the dagger itself.

How can one speak
with so much venom
without choking on the poison
and slowly dying from within?
 
We become what we say:
Fill us with blackened
charred words and we
eat ash, swallow fire,
and slowly burn
with hate
from the inside
out–
 
But fill us with love and light
and let us shine so brightly
that our pores become stars,
a constellation of hope,
 
and we will file the sharp edges
off their words, pack them
in downy daisy fluff, create
a spoken font
so soft
until there are no words
left to speak except
in green and gold song.

Ariel S. Maloney

Ariel S. Maloney teaches literature and writing to high school students in Cambridge, MA. She has published multiple op-eds about educational policy issues online, and her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in local publications such as The Inman Review, the Harvard Summer Review, and Around the World: An Anthology of Travel Writing Collected by Harvard Book Store.