Cherry Harvard

Saving My Secrets for a Deaf Man

I whispered my fears into the night,

Afraid they’d echo back,

Stronger than before.

Each secret, a stone, heavy in my chest,

Told only to the silence, to a Deaf Man

Who else could hold these fragments

without breaking?

There’s a Man who never responds,

not a twitch of recognition,

yet something in His stillness

makes the secrets safer there.

They sink into the quiet

as if it was always meant to be this way—

unnoticed, unburdened.

It feels like screaming into a void,

but the void never spits it back.

Instead, it absorbs everything,

becomes a keeper of things too heavy to carry alone,

Turned them into stories of strength.

Then it became clear,

He wasn’t listening the way it seemed—

no sound, no response,

Just a quiet knowing that lingered.

Everything spoken into the dark

was already gathered, folded into the silence,

tucked away long before

there was any understanding of its weight.

There’s peace in not being heard,

in knowing nothing has to be said

for everything to be known.

The Lord wasn’t a deaf man,

But a Holy One

Who knows my heart before I speak,

And holds my life in His hands,

With a love that silences every fear.

12 Years, A Touch

Luke 8:43-48

Twelve years,

and no one noticed the slow unraveling.

The quiet way life pulled at the seams,

each thread loosening

beneath a gaze that never landed long enough to see.

I lived on the edges,

a shadow among shadows,

silent as the hours blurred into years.

There was a day, though,

where the air was thick with more than just dust,

where the hem of a robe held more

than it should have—

a weight that wasn’t mine to carry,

yet something I reached for

without thinking.

In that moment,

the years fell away.

Not in some grand, sweeping motion,

but quietly,

like a breath held for too long,

finally released.

No one noticed,

not really.

But I did.

And in that noticing,

something shifted.

The world was still loud,

the crowd still pressed,

but the weight was gone.

No sound to follow,

just the absence of it,

a space once occupied,

now unfamiliar,

like air that moves

but doesn’t stir.

Cherry Harvard has been passionate about writing since childhood, using it as a means of coping with life’s challenges. Now pursuing a minor in Creative Writing at Palm Beach Atlantic University, she is a young widow and a single mother to a three-year-old. This marks her debut in sharing her work with the world, and she finds solace in knowing her words leave a lasting imprint through written expression.