Ballots in Our Pockets

We don’t carry crowns anymore,
we carry ballots—
folded small, tucked beside receipts
and unanswered prayers.

Politics is not the man on the screen
with a practiced smile,
it is the mother counting coins at dawn,
deciding which child eats first.

It is the factory clock coughing smoke,
the classroom ceiling leaking history,
the border drawn with someone else’s pen
through a stranger’s backyard.

They tell us power lives in buildings,
behind guarded doors and flags stitched loud.
But I’ve seen power
in a whisper that refuses silence,
in hands that keep voting
even when hope limps.

Promises arrive dressed like revolutions,
leave like landlords—
rent unpaid, windows broken,
dreams evicted.

Still, every generation inherits a question:
Will you stay quiet
or write your name into tomorrow?

The loudest laws are written slowly,
in dinner-table arguments,
in protests that ache,
in poems no one funds.

We are ruled less by leaders
and more by what we tolerate.

So if politics feels dirty,
remember—
soil is where things grow.

And one day,
long after slogans rot,
history will ask
what side of humanity
we stood on
when it mattered.