Cocooned Adolescence

The Time of Drawing Silk

For twenty-three days
you did not leave your room.
Four thousand, eight hundred and seventy hours…
Whatever you were doing in there,
I could not draw you out.

So I waited, and waited still.
You did not eat.
You turned away from the mulberry leaves
you once loved so much,
fasting in silence.

You—never large to begin with—
seemed to stop growing,
as if in rebellion for two and a half days,
a full sixty hours.
You did nothing but shake your head.
At every word, you refused—
dismissive, defiant.

Sometimes an S-shape, sometimes a figure of eight,
your head swaying left and right,
as though you would not cease
denying the world itself.

I did not know then
that inside that room,
having stopped even eating,
you were spinning silk…
A single thread, nearly fifteen hundred metres long,
woven patiently, rhythmically,
wrapping your own body.

With the shield you made,
you withdrew ever deeper within yourself.
I did not know what you would become.
Half worry, half prayer, I waited—
while all the while
you were changing
into someone I did not yet know.

At last, you became
something called a pupa—
a strange, unfamiliar form.
The cocooned silkworm you once were
now lived only in my memory,
your childhood kept by me alone.
I said you were cute back then,
and I missed you,
remembered you.

Morning came, then night.
Morning again, and night once more.
After more than ten days
of mornings and nights passing,
you emerged from your long-used room,
opening the door of darkness
into the world.

Those tiny hands and feet
were nowhere to be seen.
The white mass of silk
you wrapped around yourself for safety
had vanished.
Even the incomprehensible
adolescent pupa was gone.
Good heavens—
you had grown wings.

You were flying!
So this is how
you were becoming an adult!

*these are my own paintings*