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 wove a latticework of malice
In chambers thick with perfumed spite,
Where whispers curdled into verdicts
And envy masqueraded as right.
In clandestine communion, they drafted
The obituary of your ascent,
Architects of quiet ruin,
Surveyors of your firmament.
They named you dust.
They pressed you low beneath their heels,
As though your pulse was an inconvenience,
As though your breath required repeal.
They never glimpsed the ore within you,
The gold concealed in earthen guise;
They saw but soil upon your garments,
Not constellations in your eyes.
“Burden,” they murmured.
A syllable sharpened like winter steel.
Unmindful of the hand you offered,
Open, unarmored, real.
You were the improbable mercy,
The bridge flung over their abyss,
The lantern held in tempests
When no other dared such a risk.
And still they schemed to shear your radiance,
To confiscate your sovereign flame,
To cast you to pavements of derision,
An unnamed hunger without claim.
They longed to watch you wither.
A tattered psalm in a faithless street,
Palms upturned to indifferent heavens,
Dignity was shattered at their feet.
But destiny is not so perishable,
Nor light so easily undone.
The snare recoiled upon its makers;
The arrow curved, the circle spun.
For malice is a self-consuming fire,
A pyre built by its own hand.
And those who quarry another’s future
Unwittingly unroof their land.
You walked unscathed from their contrivance,
Your aura fierce, your spirit whole.
While life, impartial and unsparing,
Delivered harvest to their role.
Thus, you remain.
Not dust, not burden, not undone.
But a testament forged in shadow,
A brighter sovereignty is won.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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