You Don't Know (Poem)

You Don't Know

You don't know
to turn hard red clay into loam
to cultivate words

as other than their own trace elements.

You don't know
to count a page twice turned back
a story as likely unfinished as ever begun.

You don't know
to fix the cure of silence
to the moment spent caressing the edge

where tongues thicken with misunderstanding.

You don't know
to sweat the fear inside out
to prime the trigger finger's hold

to let go.

What you don't know
you don't know about me
is my patience to trill the brilliance of stars

in the deepest black holes.

© 2010 Maureen E. Doallas. All Rights Reserved.
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I wrote this poem for Carry On Tuesday, which each week provides a prompt that participants are to use wholly or partly in an original poem or prose piece.

The prompt for Tuesday, September 7, comes from the first words of Chapter 1 of Mark Twain's 1884 classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: You don't know about me. . . .  

To read other Carry on Tuesday contributors' poems or prose for Prompt #69, go here.