Poem Full of Worry Ending with My Birth

I worry that my friends

will misunderstand my silence

as a lack of love, or interest, instead

of a tent city built for my own mind,

I worry I can no longer pretend

enough to get through another

year of pretending I know

that I understand time, though I

can see my own hands; sometimes,

I worry over how to dress in a world

where a white woman wearing

a scarf over her head is assumed

to be cold, whereas with my head

cloaked, I am an immediate symbol

of a war folks have been fighting

eons-deep before I was born, a meteor.