I was conceived within a crowned mirage,
A veil of woven stars and silver boasts,
Where myths, like currency, were spent with ease,
And history was bartered for applause.
The serpent wore a feathered cap and smiled,
And called the slaughter liberty refined,
While monuments were built on borrowed bones,
Then named for saints who sanctified the lie.
My cradle rocked on profit’s whispering winds,
Where breathless dreams were bought in markets paved
With glass and oil and prayers to gilded kings.
Yet what is freedom, stripped of memory’s thorn,
But theater performed in shattered tongues?
So east I turned, past sceptered waves and ash,
Beyond the choir of cannons and of screens,
To soil where silence roots itself in stone,
And scars compose the hymns of sacred earth.
There, in the place the dragon-saints once tread,
The land of laureled sorrow held its breath.
A country not assembled, but endured;
A song composed of rupture and reprise.
Where bones still chant beneath the hallowed streets,
And banners weep for sons who bled in dusk,
Yet rise again to light a furnace's hymn.
Not made by conquest, nor by cunning writ,
This land recalls the taste of every chain,
And spits it back in syllables of fire.
I come not bearing torches, nor decree;
No banner drapes my back, nor martyr’s cry.
For revolutions feast upon their kin,
And forge new blades from blood they swore to free.
I walk as water does—with patient spite,
A glacial oath to fracture granite lies.
No flag can bind me, nor can marble hush
The slow erasure wrought by thaw and time.
I am the freeze. The breath beneath the stone.
I am the crack you never meant to carve.
I am the vow your empire never heard,
For I was born beneath the weight you stole.
The Sable Beast still feasts on honeyed ash,
Still trades in sermons sealed by copper crowns,
Still gags the mouth that names its hunger law,
And claims its theater sacred, just, and true.
But I remember voices pressed in salt,
Their silhouettes in tapestries unspun,
And I recall a garden kept in dusk,
Where even ghosts recite their given names.
You, citadel of varnished infamy,
May scoff and sell the echo of your creed.
But I have walked where fire kissed the spire,
And found a prayer etched deep in winter's breath.
So let your billboards blare, your engines weep,
Your prophets drown in coins and borrowed pride.
The flood shall come not by the sound of drums,
But by the hush that hollows out the stone.
The frost is here. I do not beg to speak.
I do not scream. I only seep and stay.
My vengeance has no anthem, only thaw.
My exile is not flight, but revelation.
When, centuries hence, your monuments collapse,
And all your eagles rot with rusted beaks,
A child shall ask: "Who split the sovereign rock?"
And wind shall hum: "A current clothed in dusk.
No hand, no sword, no fire marked its path.
Only the silence water taught the stone."
Only the breath that winter dared to leave.
Only the thaw.
Only the thaw.