Your worst fire burns as a furnace,
feeding warmth to strangers,
whose smiles rise like chimney smoke,
drifting away without a glance.
Your cries break, dissolve in the air,
just a passing breeze, unnoticed.
They fall as quiet rain, quenching alien soils,
while your fields lie cracked and empty,
parched in their lonely need.
Pains pile on,
added by nameless hands that hold weighty pens,
building their towers on bones
drawing invisible borders, contracts,
and statistics on fading paper.
To them, you are only a syllable,
a line in a quarterly report,
a faceless echo lost between bottom lines.
The soil drinks anguish—
silent and still.
No faces meet theirs,
only the turning backs of giants
too large to see the ground they crush.
You call out from the chasm,
but the horizon shows no hand reaching down,
just tall steel towers with tinted windows
that turn away from your empty eyes.
The cities move,
but they move like indifferent gears,
wheels oiled by someone else's sorrows.
A dandelion grows by your feet,
yellow fire in a gray world.
Its seeds scatter, carried by wind,
fragile parachutes aloft,
defiant and hopeful—
making homes where no tower stands,
finding warmth in broken places.
Who will hear the echo
when the wind turns away?
