Lizzy

the quietest hour of dawn is here

i am half hope and half agony

aching for a glimpse of Your light

like a dying star yearning to be held by the night

for i miss You

the moon keeps Your silence in its tide

while my hands gather seasons that never bloom

and every dawn mistakes my waiting for prayer

because if seeing You again means goodbye

then i will choose the pain of yearning

and spend a lifetime haunted by Your silence

over surrendering to indifference

and my heart yearns for Your presence

as my body pleads to disappear into slumber

for there is no comfort that comes from the night

but the slow ache of longing

the verses refuse to come to me

because Your silence is all that remains

vast and merciless

like the dawn You asked me to quit You

There is perhaps no actor more committed to the performance of compassion than the elite. Their concern for the poor arrives neatly packaged in panel discussions, opinion columns, and social media posts adorned with the appropriate vocabulary of justice. Yet the poor, more often than not, function as little more than stage props in this moral theater. They are photographed, quoted, studied, and romanticized—so long as they remain useful in affirming the righteousness of those speaking on their behalf.

The comedy begins when the poor stop behaving according to script. The moment a laborer expresses an unpopular opinion, a farmer rejects fashionable politics, or a street vendor refuses to conform to elite expectations, sympathy evaporates with astonishing speed. The same people who insist on "listening to marginalized voices" suddenly discover that not all marginalized voices are worth hearing. Apparently, the poor are only wise when they agree with their benefactors. Otherwise, they are dismissed as ignorant, misinformed, or victims of their own stupidity.

One cannot help but admire the efficiency of this arrangement. Entire libraries may be consumed in the pursuit of understanding poverty, yet genuine comprehension remains elusive. Reading about hardship and living through it are not the same enterprise. One may annotate every sociological text ever written and still have no idea what it means to choose between rent and food, to watch opportunities migrate elsewhere, or to see one's hometown treated as an afterthought by those who govern from afar. Knowledge, after all, is not a substitute for experience, though many privileged people seem determined to prove otherwise.

The irony becomes even sharper when discussing opportunity. The very people who flourish under a system that concentrates wealth, industries, and influence in a handful of urban centers often wonder aloud why migrants continue arriving in search of work. They ask this question with genuine bewilderment, as though jobs descend from heaven rather than being clustered by decades of political and economic centralization. It is a remarkable feat: benefiting from an arrangement while simultaneously expressing confusion about its consequences.

Meanwhile, regions that supply labor, resources, revenue, and talent are expected to remain grateful for the privilege of being neglected. Their forests, seas, farms, and workers contribute to the prosperity enjoyed elsewhere, yet development often arrives in the form of promises, studies, and ceremonial speeches. The flow of wealth resembles a one-way highway. Resources travel out; opportunities rarely make the return trip. And somehow, when people leave in search of better prospects, they are treated as though they are inconveniencing the very system that pushed them away.

i cannot be the cure

nor can i free You from its tyranny

but i can keep the heavens from collapsing

as You surrender to its weight

i only write about Your beauty

but i do not want You for Your perfection

because i saw the fragments

of Your broken pieces first

there are pillars collapsing quietly beneath the weight of Your breathing,

while my nameless prayers wander oceans seeking the shape of You.

i have carried storms inside my ribs,

as though existence itself bends reverently around Your passing —

and every star abandons its distance merely to witness You.

Your silence resembles ancient kingdoms swallowed beneath sacred waters,

yet i remain humble before its ruinous and luminous decree.

no scripture has ever held a void resembling from within,

for even eternity appears frail beside Your fleeting shadow —

and my pulse becomes a solemn offering whenever You appear.

i have sworn to bleed for You beyond this world's mortal abundance,

beyond the fragile reaches of longing human tongues could measure.

You are the final language wandering through my forsaken corridors,

the sacred ache fastening galaxies around my trembling existence —

beneath the cathedral hush of midnight, i lay my pride to the stones,

like some weary penitent aching for ruin to become sacrament.

i would traverse the embers of my own undoing for You,

for even Your silence descends veiled in celestial conflagration—

and i have mistaken surrender for something sacred.

there is a famine within me that only Your existence has ever fed,

a liturgy inscribed in marrow and borne like an archaic wound.

i would kneel where Your shadow unfurls and name it mercy,

though every prayer i utter returns blood-warm and unrelenting—

still, i drink from it as though divinely decreed.

if heaven were to speak, i reckon it would borrow your mouth,

tender enough to absolve, that evil empires submit to perish.

and i, diminished thing, would willingly bow before You,

offering the frail altar of my body to the dark—

i have become a sanctuary for sorrows,

where every wound arrives like sacred scripture.

i gather the splinters Your silence scattered,

and press them deep into my yielding marrow—

as though devastation were a form of veneration.

i asked the night to sharpen all its mercies,

to carve its hunger gently through my veins.

for even Your absence tastes almost celestial,

a bitter sacrament i swallow without trembling—

because ruin beside You still resembles grace.

but let me steep within this anguish,

this longing throb beneath my ribs.

this hollow chest i once deemed vacant,

now trembles with exquisite catastrophe—

embers still linger beneath my folded ribs,

i buried Your echoes beneath wintered marrow.

yet one glance unfastened each starving cathedral,

and every locked corridor opened its teeth—

like drowned bells remembering their ancient hymns.

the ceiling carried Your shadow through midnight,

i drank silence until my throat turned sepulchral.

still Your absence crawled beneath ruined sanctuaries,

a slow procession threading through my core—

while sleep rotted quietly beside my breathing.

now every hour tastes faintly of iron,

i hear Your footsteps inside abandoned mirrors.

the past returns wearing funeral-colored roses,

and my hollowed chambers bloom with fever again—

the vast distance remains a silent ache,

this tethered spirit wanders through the void.

Your essence lingers as a hollow phantom,

within the marrow of this fragile frame—

a quiet torment persists beneath the skin.

the gravity of Your absence pulls hard,

it anchors every thought to some distant shore.

this mind traces the curve of Your memory,

across the threshold of a thousand sleepless hours—

the hunger grows where touch can never reach.

an eternal vigil keeps the pulse awake,

sustained by the echo of Your unspoken name.

this heart bleeds for a grace never known,

past the limits of this weary human sight—