They built with hands calloused by silence,
stacked bricks of duty, mortar of shame.
No blueprint but survival,
no scaffold but tradition’s name.

The walls rose crooked,
corners sharp with secrets,
windows too narrow for light
to pass through unfiltered.

They laid the hearth with borrowed stone,
a grief inherited,
a joy deferred,
a love that never learned to speak.

We live in rooms they shaped,
tiptoe over floorboards that groan
with every unspoken word,
every withheld embrace.

The roof leaks when we argue.
The beams tremble when we cry.
We patch with apologies,
plaster over pain with politeness.

But the foundation,
oh, the foundation,
was poured in haste,
on soil that shifts with memory.

And still we dwell here,
in this house of lineage,
learning to mend what was never level,
to love in spite of the fault lines.