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Love's Dark Reflection #lovepoetry #poetrydaily #poemaday

Love was never a heartbeat. It was the echo left behind after the heart forgot why it was still beating. It arrived wearing another person's face, its hands stitched together from promises that had already begun to rot. I welcomed it. Not because it was kind, but because loneliness knows how to mistake a wolf for warmth. Every smile it offered cast a longer shadow. Every whispered "forever" fed another ghost sleeping beneath my ribs. The thought of love is a clever liar. It builds cathedrals from broken mirrors, then asks us to kneel before our own reflections, calling the illusion destiny. How eagerly we obey. We water flowers that grow from graves, write poems to people who never truly existed, and embrace memories still unborn. Love watches. Silent. Patient. Like a spider waiting in the center of a web woven from hope. It never forces us inside. It simply lets us believe the silver threads are rays of morning light. By the time we understand, the sky has forgotten our ...
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Young Village Wife #poem #sadpoetry #heartbreak

They named her their daughter-in-law.
before she learned her own name.
Marriage found her young,
not as a choice,
but as a destination already decided.

Her hands were trained
before her mind was asked.
Sweep. Cook. Obey.
Fetch water before sunrise,
carry firewood before thought.
This is the alphabet she was taught.

Village dust settled into her thoughts,
not because she lacked vision,
but because no one let her look past the hills.
Days repeat like commands—
live, work, sleep, repeat—
a body moving on borrowed instructions.

She lives under rules that never asked her consent.
Love is a duty.
Silence is respect.
Endurance is praised as strength.
She moves like a machine
that never learned it could choose its direction.

The city is a rumor.
Education, a foreign language.
Opportunity, a story told to other women,
in other words,
with better luck at birth.

And yet—
this is the cruelest part—
No one knows what she could have been.
No one tested her mind.
No one stretched her curiosity.
No one gave her light
or freedom,
or a book that asked questions instead of giving orders.

She might have been brilliant.
Strategic.
Inventive.
A voice meant for rooms beyond mud walls.
A talent large enough for the globe,
compressed into survival.

What a world she is living in-
not because she is small,
But because her world was made small for her.

And a good life, in a place she lives,
means learning how to live well under marriage rules, 

To live like a slave and disappear
without ever being called lost.


© 2026 Gloria Penelope

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