You laugh at them. You point your finger and call them a fool. Their silence amuses you, their gentleness becomes your joke, and the crowd joins your laughter as if kindness were weakness. It feels enjoyable today, sweet on your tongue like careless victory. Their patience becomes your stage, their humility your entertainment. But time is a quiet witness. It watches without speaking, It writes its lessons slowly in the turning pages of life. A day will come When laughter turns into tears. The echoes of your mockery will return to your own ears like thunder across an empty sky. Situations will arise without warning, storms without hands to beat you Yet heavy enough to break your pride. Pain will arrive quietly, And you will feel the trembling of a heart that once laughed too loudly. And that fool, that funny person you once mocked, may stand in the distance, not laughing, but witnessing your tears, your shaking voice, Your falling ego. For life has a patient way of bending the tallest p...
Not cruel—only committed,
as the sun is committed to dawn,
rising without petition,
owing its radiance to no applause.
Life will not cradle me in softened palms,
nor suspend me in the mercy of comfort.
It loosens its grip,
and so I stand,
self-anchored, unborrowed, unbent.
I gleam from the labor of my own becoming,
from the sacred salt of sweat
that anoints my brow like consecration.
What nourishes me
sprang from soil I tilled in solitude.
I feast only upon effort earned,
bread kneaded by persistence,
water drawn from the well of resolve.
I am who I am,
not an echo shaped by passing voices,
not a mirror trembling for approval.
Identity, for me,
is forged in the furnace of discipline,
tempered by silence,
hardened by truth.
Not cruel—only focused.
A blade does not apologize for its sharpness;
It was made to cut through illusion.
I was not born to decorate comfort,
nor to contort myself
into the smallness of expectation.
I do not labor to entertain fleeting praise,
nor bend to become a spectacle of approval.
I refuse the theater of foolishness
where wisdom is bartered for applause.
I walk instead toward triumph,
not loud, but luminous.
Not hurried, but deliberate.
Triumph not of conquest over others,
But of sovereignty over self.
Let misunderstanding murmur in the distance;
Discipline is often mistaken for distance,
clarity for coldness.
Yet my stillness is not cruelty,
It is alignment.
I am not cruel.
I am carved by purpose,
guided by discernment,
crowned by wisdom earned in solitude.
And from that quiet summit,
I shine,
not by permission,
But by being who I am.
© 2026 Gloria Penelope
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