wildscape. literary journal

Featured Poet of Issue 6 – Read Interview Here!

We Did Not Inherit This Silence
by Veronica Tucker

The news shows a mother
lifting her child from a street
that has forgotten anything but ruin.
She holds him the way all mothers do,
as if her arms could undo
what entered his body.

In the corner of the screen
a map traces absence,
the word genocide bright
as a warning label.

I watch from a couch
littered with yesterday’s crumbs.
My children argue over the remote.
The dog dreams at our feet.
This is the calm
they say everyone deserves,
a room where no one is dying
on the floor beside the coffee table.

In the emergency department
I see how rarely this safety is given.
Bodies arrive marked by borders,
lungs filled with another country’s smoke,
wrists circled by plastic restraints
instead of friendship bracelets.
Students shot at graduation,
villages burned to dust,
families stopped at a line
someone else drew.
The details change.
The pattern does not.

I write for the ones
who did not finish their own poems,
the boy who loved
his grandmother’s kitchen,
the child collecting shells
in a place that has lost its shore,
the teenager’s notebook
waiting on a desk
no one will sit at again.

I am not here to be gentle.
I want the page to sound
like a metal detector
that keeps screaming
until someone notices
the danger is everywhere.

Remember the first time
your hand was held at a crosswalk
and you were promised safety.
Now imagine never hearing it,
or hearing it and learning
it was a lie.

We did not inherit this silence.
It was built to keep certain cries
on the other side of the wall.
Every word I write is a crack,
every line a fracture,
until the calm at the beginning
belongs to every child
and not just the ones
the camera stays with long enough
to count the loss.

about the author // Veronica Tucker