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When Your Hands Are Empty #poemofhope #faithpoetry #spokenwordpoetry

There will be a season when you have done all you know to do and still, nothing. No answer at the door. No sudden change. No sign in the sky telling you that tomorrow will be kinder. Just you, your unanswered prayer, and the strange silence that makes you question whether God is still listening. He is. Do not mistake silence for absence. Some of God's deepest work happens without making a sound. Roots grow in darkness. Healing happens beneath skin. Morning begins long before the window knows there is light. And somewhere beyond what you can see, your life is being moved by hands you cannot follow. So do not abandon your faith because you cannot trace God's footsteps. You were never promised a clear view. You were given enough light for the next step. Take it. Even if your knees shake. Even if your heart has questions your mouth is afraid to ask. Take it. Faith is not a life without uncertainty. It is waking up with uncertainty beside you and refusing to let it choose your direc...

The Reckoning of Mirrors #sadpoetry #freeverse #poem

Behold,
when the sovereign of self-regard
finds his empire of glass undone,
and the mirror—once obedient,
splinters beneath the weight of truth.

His tears awaken then.
Not of contrition,
nor of humbled grace,
but of wounded vanity,
bleeding from the fracture
of his own illusion.

He, the architect of tender devastations,
harvester of borrowed devotion,
moved through hearts
as though they were provinces to conquer,
leaving famine where he once feasted.

No tremor touched him then.
No midnight conscience
gnawed at his repose.
He baptized cruelty as necessity,
perfumed manipulation as charm,
and enthroned himself
in the cathedral of his own reflection.

But Karma,
ancient and incorruptible,
keeps her vigil beyond applause.
She writes in invisible ink,
inscribing consequence
into the marrow of time.

When she descends,
it is not with fury,
but with inevitability.

The admirers dissolve like mist.
The echo of praise decays into silence.
The throne reveals itself
as scaffolding.

And there,
amid the ruins of self-adoration,
his tears ignite.

Activated not by sorrow for others,
but by the unbearable sight
of his own smallness.

Thus life concludes its lesson:
not by the tyrant’s design,
not by the choreography
of his calculated dominion,
but by the austere hand of balance.

For existence bows to no ego.
It bends to no fabricated grandeur.
It answers only to the quiet arithmetic
of deed and return.

So let it be written,
that endings are not authored
by arrogance,
but by reckoning.

And when the final mirror stands unshattered,
it will not flatter.
It will not distort.

It will reveal.

That is life,
severe, sovereign,
and exquisitely exact.


© 2026 Gloria Penelope

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