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...
A serpent coils within your mother’s deeds,
not born of flesh, but of learned venom.
She fed her children bitter truths,
taught them to name strangers as enemies
before they learned how to listen.
Her words became seeds,
pressed into young hearts like commandments.
What she feared, they learned to hate.
What she despised, they were taught to reject.
Thus the poison traveled
quietly, faithfully
from generation to generation.
Her heart is a house of old anger,
rooms locked with grudges,
walls painted with rage against the innocent.
She mistakes wounds for wisdom,
and pain for righteousness.
Those who never harmed her
carry the weight of her fury.
Those who know nothing of her past
are sentenced by it.
The serpent does not ask who deserves the bite.
And still the question lingers,
soft but relentless as time:
When will she repent?
When will she loosen her grip on hatred
and let mercy breathe where rage has lived?
For until the serpent is named,
until the poison is refused,
her legacy will not be love
but the echo of harm
mistaken for inheritance.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
Comments