When the World Forgets to Breathe

The world spins, but slower now,

as if its lungs are cracked,

as if the air refuses to stay inside.

Every headline is a wound,

every siren a confession

that we have failed again.

I scroll until my eyes sting,

until my thumb burns red,

chasing truths I cannot hold,

collecting sorrows I cannot carry.

Once, the screen was a toy.

Bright, harmless,

like a window into a softer life.

Now it is a graveyard.

I hold it in my hands

and it pulses like a heart,

but whose heart?

My own?

The thousands buried beneath rubble?

It burns against my palm

like an enemy I cannot put down.

I tell myself I will look away.

I never do.

I see too much, as we all do.

Children with blood in their hair,

women clawing at locked doors,

men who grin over broken bodies.

And I wonder —

when did grief become a daily meal?

When did violence turn ordinary,

like weather, like traffic,

like breathing?

At night, I dream in fragments.

A soldier without a face.

A mother without a child.

A child without a name.

They follow me into morning.

I eat beside them,

I work beside them,

I laugh beside them,

though my laughter cracks

like glass under weight.

The politicians pray with closed eyes,

palms lifted toward heaven,

while ash rains over Gazan children

still buried, still bleeding,

still nameless in their mouths.

In my own city,

a boy not yet grown

raises a gun against another boy.

Lockers rattle,

the sound echoes in gym rafters,

and childhood dies again.

At the vigil, candles flicker,

mothers weep across from each other,

and I cannot tell whose grief is heavier.

It feels rehearsed —

this ritual of loss.

Different faces.

Same story.

I want to believe there is a cure.

That speaking matters.

That kindness counts.

That if I hand my last four dollars

to the stranger outside the store,

I have done enough.

But the hunger in his hand

clings to me all night.

And I wake raw,

skin rubbed to the bone,

wondering if mercy is only

a bandage on a wound

that never closes.

Still, life flickers.

Children draw rainbows on cracked sidewalks.

A father spins his son

against the sky’s emptiness.

Neighbors break their bread in half

even when they have little to eat.

And I — tired, trembling —

still write.

Perhaps hopelessness is honesty.

But silence is surrender.

The monster in the suit,

grey-haired and smiling,

feeds on our quiet.

If I look away,

if I shut my mouth,

I become his accomplice.

So I will not.

The world spins, slower now,

lungs broken,

but still breathing.

And while it breathes,

so will I.

With words,

with rage,

with sorrow,

with love.

Not because I believe it will save us.

But because if I do nothing,

I too become the silence.

And silence,

always,

kills.