The Sound and the Fury - Sohayla Mojtahedi Smith

I hear the car before it turns the corner — that engine, a whispered warning,

like birds dropping silent before the storm,

and something in my chest lifts with it,

tightens with it, names itself Dread before my mind can find the word.

I become ears. I become a creature made entirely of ears.

The garage door lifts its iron jaw and I stand very still at the kitchen counter,

reading the sound the way sailors read the sky before a squall —

the pressure-shift, the temperature drop…

the silence that is not quite silent,

the held-breath of a house that has learned, as I have learned, to brace.

The door handle turns, a small silver moon rotating in its socket,

and I read that too — the speed, the angle of the wrist —

I count the footsteps that follow, each landing like a verdict,

and I know the difference between a man coming home

and a man arriving to wage a war.

There is a sound he makes — small, involuntary, almost nothing —

a sniff, a breath drawn sharp and short,

and I hear it before the door is fully open, before his shadow crosses the threshold.

My blood knows it first, sends the signal

S-O-S

through every corridor —

run, still, run, still —

the oldest argument the body has ever fought within itself.

I have become fluent in a language I never chose.

The set of his shoulders, the angle of his jaw, the way his eyes move before his mouth does —

I am fluent in this.

And still — I wish more than anything I were illiterate.

Anxiety does not knock. It pours through the baseboards, rises from the floor, fills the room

the way cold water fills a sinking thing — quietly, completely…

without apology.

without a sound.

When he screams, I go deaf — not from the volume but from the fullness of it,

from the way rage occupies every corner, every room at once,

and into that silence I hear my heartbeat, my heartbeat, my heartbeat —

a small, stubborn drum that says still here, still here, still here.But there was a song. There is always a song — even in the loudest rooms,

a Nantucket Briar Rose blooming through the cracks of a stone wall,

rooted in salt and wind and winter,

flowering in the face of everything that said it couldn't, wouldn't, shouldn't.

That song said: this is not forever. That song said: you are not what he names you.

That song said: you are walking toward a door you cannot see yet, but it is there.

I have been walking toward the light for years lost in time…

Some mornings it was only a thread — barely visible, barely warm, but there,

and I followed it through the flood and the fury, through the slow time and the mirrors that lied.

Hope is not a feeling — hope is a direction, and real love waits on the other side of this.

Let the sound be heard. Let the fury waste itself against stone.

I am the rose of long patience and long-waiting things.

I am the small, stubborn drum — persistent — defying silence.

I am the light that has been walking, and walking, back toward itself.

I am ears. I am a creature made entirely of ears.

Still here. Still here. Still listening.

Below you can listen to Sohayla song - Nantucket Briar Rose

https://youtu.be/LxQ3lWrTvDI?si=t6pBlhgTbsnblZ1k

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Sohayla Mojtahedi Smith is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist, poet, songwriter, and professional painter whose work explores adversity, identity, relationships, and reclamation. Her writing and visual art draw from lived experience, weaving themes of endurance and transformation across poetry, music, and collage. A published author and recording artist with international airplay, she brings both tenderness and strength to her creative practice. In addition to her artistic work, she is an educator and life coach who believes art is a profound act of healing and self-definition.

@sohaylasmith