Shut Out

I met her in the orphanage That sheltered drab lives A young girl past her teens Deaf and dumb, not by birth But through an accident She had a past, bright n' beautiful But the free moving gears Came suddenly to a painful halt Once her ocean was dotted with Boats ready to set sail Now she seems to drift Through a vacant space Darting in and out of shadows Through gestures wild She tries to communicate But is mostly incomprehensible And her face goes into scowling As she fails to make herself understood Yet her eyes tell a story Which brighten at the prospect Of someone ready to listen intent Her inability doesn't deter her From trying again and again to recount Some prized incident locked up in her memory That is a shut vault now Whose key is lost to her forever! Yet in her bastion of darkness A lantern still flickers!