There is a place inside you No map has ever traced, a quiet room behind the ribs where light forgets to stay. No one sees it when you smile, No one hears it when you speak. It moves beneath your laughter like a river running deep. It is yours alone to carry, not carved for other hands, a language made of silence Only your soul understands. Some mornings it is heavier, a stone you cannot name, And still you rise and wear your life as if it were the same. But pain, it does not leave you when ignored or pushed away, it waits within the folds of time, it learns you day by day. It is not your enemy, though it cuts without a sound; it is the truth you buried but still lives underground. And yes, there are nights it breaks you, when endurance feels too wide, when even breath feels borrowed And there is nowhere left to hide. Yet somehow you continue, not because you do not fall, but because within the breaking You still answer life’s call. You learn to walk beside it, not beneath it, not above...
They speak from tables heavy with bread,
Hands soft from never begging the day,
Calling cruelty order, calling silence sense,
Naming nonsense, the tongue of the poor.
From towers built on borrowed backs,
They rain down laws like cold, sharp stones,
Mistaking hunger for laziness,
And rags for a chosen skin.
Poor orphans wander with empty bowls of hope,
Stomachs singing the song of absence,
Eyes trained to search for mercy
In streets where mercy learned to hide.
Abuse wears gold and speaks with pride,
Its laughter loud, its conscience thin,
While small hands clutch the ache of night,
And learn too early how to endure.
For them, life is an open wound,
No salve, no shelter, no gentle hand,
Pain stitched into every morning,
And reopened by each setting sun.
Yet still they breathe. Still, they stand.
Bones carrying more courage than crowns,
Waiting for a world to remember
That hunger is a normal thing,
And being poor is not a sin.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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