Skip to main content

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 ...

You Outran Their Snare #freeverse #sadpoetry #poem

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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Where Her Heartbeat Remains #sadpoetry #poetryaddict #poemofgrief

She was here, for a moment too small for the clocks to measure, too brief for the world to understand, yet long enough to leave fingerprints upon a mother's soul. A baby girl. A whispered promise wrapped in fragile dreams, carried beneath a hopeful heart that had already imagined a thousand tomorrows. Then came the silence. A silence so heavy it bent the walls inward. A silence that settled inside empty rooms, inside folded blankets, inside the spaces where laughter was meant to grow. The mother wept. Not the gentle tears that fall with ordinary sadness. These were ancient tears. The kind born from a wound too deep for language, too sacred for explanation. She cried for first steps that would never mark the floor. For tiny hands that would never reach for hers. For lullabies that would remain unsung, their melodies trapped forever inside her trembling chest. Night after night, she gathered her grief like broken glass. Each memory, each dream, each unanswered prayer cut her anew. Th...

Laughter in Dark Corners #poem #freeverse #poetryaddict

 In the house where the wallpaper peels like old confessions, laughter survives first. Not in the kitchen where the clocks hold their breath, nor in the doorway where apologies rot in the frame, but in dark corners. There, beneath the stairs, behind coats smelling of rain and cigarettes, someone once laughed so hard the dust woke up dancing. The sound stayed. Even now, midnight gathers itself in the sharp mouths of rooms, and grief walks carefully, counting its silverware, checking the locks twice. Still... from the corner near the furnace, a crooked little laugh escapes, warm as contraband. It knows things. It knows sorrow is heavy but never balanced. Knows fear hates being mocked. Knows shadows loosen when somebody grins inside them. So the laughter waits there, knees tucked to its chest, bright-eyed as a stray cat, refusing extinction. And sometimes, when the whole house aches with silence, it rises, small at first, a cracked teacup sound, a thief of funerals, until even the dar...

The Empty Frame #sadpoetry #poetrydaily #poetryaddict

I built my future out of sleepless nights, Stacking tomorrow on pages of yesterday. Every examination felt like a doorway, Every certificate, another key. They applauded the day I crossed the stage. Smiles were handed to me like promises. They said the world belonged to those who learned. No one warned me that a key cannot open a door that was never built. My qualifications sleep inside a folder, Protected from dust, Yet helpless against unpaid bills. The world asks what I can produce, Not how many books I have survived. I memorized the language of success, But no one taught me how failure introduces itself without knocking. How strange it is to know the answers in a classroom, Yet stand speechless before life. Education sharpened my mind, But it could not soften rejection. It taught me to calculate numbers, Yet never measured the distance between effort and opportunity. There are days I feel like a library placed in the middle of a desert. Filled with knowledge, Surrounded by thirst. ...