Stuck-up little brown-noser
is what they call her.
But her passion for learning
is not inspired by
a desire for high grades
and her conversations
with teachers
have  nothing to do
with school.

Yet she absorbs
all the knowledge she can,
so that when she needs
to escape
the laughs and mocking voices,
her world will be built
of all she knows
and all she does not.
It must be firm,
it must be real,
and she must believe
in this place of
amethyst and water lilies,
white peaches and purple dahlias,
rising suns and secret twilights,
or she will be lost.

Her work is of
building hopes,
and repairing her shattered dreams,
so they will never be called
broken and useless
and swept away
like fragments of glass.

She listens to people
and loves them,
even when she knows
one of them may be the next
to throw a knife.
She drinks in their stories
so they will become hers,
will become part of her being,
will inhabit her world.

If you come upon her
when she is
alone,
secluded and
still,
you may glimpse the body,
but never the spirit
save through her eyes
that change
from blue to gray to purple
when she’s gone to a world
 hidden so deeply,
locked so tightly,
that you can never follow.