Quiet in the Crowd
In a hall where voices gather, rising wild and loud,
she sits within her silence, drifting far from every crowd.
Their laughter sweeps around her—bright as unmoored flame—
a wind that never warms her, a song that speaks no name.
She shapes a careful smile, fragile as a moth’s faint flight,
yet something holds her distant, wrapped in glass too thin for light.
She fears her gentle meanings tumble out as sharpened stone,
that every word turned crooked leaves her kindness overthrown.
She longs to bruise no spirit, only find a place to stand,
but even grace feels heavy, trembling in her unsure hand.
A loneliness beneath the noise hums low like buried rain,
a shadow pacing with her through the sunlit fields of pain.
At times it whispers darkness—soft, persuasive, low and deep—
that nothing lifts this weight she bears, no matter what she keeps.
Not a wish for endings—only longing for release,
a moment where the aching stills, a fleeting breath of peace.
Yet still she threads her hours with the frailest strands of dawn,
letting faint and fragile glimmers guide her stumbling steps along.
A softened glance, a quiet mercy, flickers in the dim—
small lanterns in a distant fog, though far, still never grim.
And though the crowd grows ghostlike, shifting, blurring into air,
she clings to one enduring truth that breaks through her despair:
to lose one’s way in shadow is not being lost for good—
for even souls who wander deep may yet be understood.
