A Descendant's Burden.

Sonnet I

I am a descendant of blood, death, deliverance and triumph

A mighty storm still in motion, a brew of saltpeter and bitter vetch

Blackbirds peck at the scabs, still bleeding, hurting...still healing

Red hot breaths still collide with black and white on street corners

And on the battlefields of modern life...each refusing to yield

I become the hesitation between the bloodshed and the sword

The glow in the headlights of the human trucks, cars and buses colliding

A ghost in the windshield, a machine not yet shattered, not yet spared.

Am I a riff in life's comic strip? A surreal sword hovering mid-air...

Headlights illuminating a spectral figure made of prophecy. A guard.

I am A pause-shaped god , caught between impact and intention,

The breath held by history , before it screams once more.

Still, I find the places where the shadows dwell in shared compromise

Preaching peace, grinding my teeth, as it all unravels, rebirths...rewinds.

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Sonnet II

Let them refuse to acknowledge our climb from the abyss

We who rose with ash in our lungs and burrs in our fists.

Their silence is scaffolding built to dismiss

the roots that remember what history twists.

We carved out ladders from bone and belief,

sang melismatic spirituals to the ghosts in the stone.

Each scar is a scripture, each tear a motif of threads,

mysticism reassembled from marrow and moan.

Let them avert their gaze from our ascent,

from the firelight blooming in our broken skin.

We are the echo that won’t stay silent,

the hymn of the fallen who rise again.

So let them forget...we’ll still be the proof:

A Forest of trees growing skyward from a shattered roof.