The Secret Wall Poem by Joni Moosman

In my parent's house there was a wall of pain.
There we wrote all the dreams they took away from us,
You know how children play?
All the words we couldn't say

We wrote with tears,
because they cut out our tongues with my mother's sewing shears.
We wrote with the welts they put upon our backs and thighs.
Family secret we couldn't reveal to anyone.

We wrote in poems and Shakespeare.
Our own Di Vinci code, the code they didn't understand.
One day they took white paint and washed it all away.
A paint made of of broken bones and clay.

As we grew older our tongues grew back, Oh what a disaster.
and the ink leaked through like blood on plaster.
And all i heard you say was, 'That never happened.'
You were just kids and didn't understand.