The Blood

a poem about inherited sorrow and the body that remembers

from the collection:
a Hundred Ways to Be Held by the Rain
→ Phase: downpour – heartbreak, rage

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Why this poem

Some grief doesn’t belong to us — and yet, we carry it anyway.

This one came from the marrow.

I didn’t write this as a metaphor. I wrote it because sometimes my body aches in places grief has lived longer than memory. I wrote it for every time I sat in a doctor’s office getting tested for iron, but what I really needed was someone to test for sorrow. For rage I didn’t earn but still carry. For all the screams swallowed by women who came before me — mothers folding laundry with tears in their mouths, grandmothers surviving war with silence in their throats.

This piece was written for those of us whose bodies have become archives. “The Blood” is my refusal to romanticize inheritance. It’s what happens when you realize you’re the last branch on a haunted tree and the roots are still weeping.

I’ve been told I’m “too sensitive.” But maybe my blood just remembers more. Maybe I’m not broken — just saturated.

“The Blood” is not a soft poem. It doesn't seek resolution. It doesn’t bloom.
It pulses.
It resists.
It ends what needs ending.

It belongs to the “downpour” phase in my five-part poetry collection a Hundred Ways to Be Held by the Rain — the section where heartbreak and rage finally speak. This poem is not here to heal. It's here to sever — to stop the pattern, to choose rupture over repetition.

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Who it’s for

For the daughters of silence.
For the sons of survival.
For anyone who’s ever felt like their bones were humming with a history they never consented to carry.
This one’s yours.

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The Blood

It was never just mine.
This blood carries voices I’ve never heard
but still wake screaming for.
It holds sorrow like sediment—
layered, compacted,
passed down like heirlooms wrapped in grief.

They say blood is thicker than water,
but mine feels more like sap—
slow, heavy,
impossible to scrub from skin once it stains.

It remembers wars I never fought,
betrayals I didn’t cause,
and mothers who wept while folding laundry.
The ache isn’t metaphorical.

It pulses.
It spikes when I hold rage too long.
It hums in migraines,
and screams through the hollows of my joints.

Some call this inherited trauma.
I call it haunting with a pulse.
Because even in silence,
the blood keeps score.
Even in peace,
it prepares for war.

Doctors test it for iron.
For sugar.
For markers of disease.
But no one tests it for grief.
For shame.
For all the swallowed screams
it ferried from womb to womb
until it reached me.

And here I am,
the last branch on a wailing tree—
sap-stained hands
digging into soil that never loved me.

I don’t want to bloom from this.
I want it to end.
Let this be the final pulse
that carries sorrow through the skin.
Let my blood be the first
to hum a different song.

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© 2025 Solena Vyhra. All rights reserved.
This work is part of the poetry collection a Hundred Ways to Be Held by the Rain. No part of this poem, including text or visual design, may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the author.
For inquiries, permissions, or collaborations, please contact: solenavyhra@gmail.com

Illustration and layout by Solena Vyhra.
Typography: Special Elite (poem titles), Signature (author tag).
Published on Substack via Where Silence Becomes Ritual.