Ashes of the Silent

Not the boy who painted stars on the wall of his broken school.

Not the girl who dreamed of singing loud enough to drown the bombs.

Not the mother who hummed lullabies louder each night

so her child wouldn’t hear the sirens.

But war arrived anyway.

Not with reason—

but with smoke.

Not with justice—

but with steel.

And somewhere,

in a high-rise built on bones,

a man in a suit signs a paper

that explodes a city.

He calls it strategy.

We call it slaughter.

The streets scream—

not from protestors,

but from ghosts

still looking for their names

in the dust.

Hope tries to speak,

but its voice is drowned

in the oil-slick chant

of profit margins

and nationalist hymns.

And the rich?

They clink their glasses

to the tune of collapsing skylines.

Sip champagne aged in cellars

built over mass graves.

Their children sleep in beds

with pillows softer

than the silence of a wiped-out village.

This is the price of silence.

The currency of complicity.

Because bombs don’t drop without boardroom approval.

And missiles don’t launch

without someone earning interest.

Meanwhile,

a boy somewhere

counts down from ten

pretending the blinking red light

is just a game.

His sister

draws butterflies on a cracked wall,

her crayons dull,

but her defiance brighter

than any warhead.

And yet they tell us

to believe.

To trust the clean suits

and bloodless hands.

To stay quiet.

To “move on.”

To call it necessary.

But we remember.

We remember the smell of truth

when it burns.

We remember the way the earth shakes

not from bombs—

but from the weight of indifference.

And still—

we write.

We protest.

We mourn.

We scream into the void

hoping something echoes back.

Because silence

is the sharpest weapon they wield.

And we?

We are the voices

they cannot bury.