Survival

Survival

What is the cost of silence?
Of hands that work but never hold
what they harvest.

What is the price of a name
when the tongue that speaks it
is no longer yours?

How many years must a body bend
before it forgets how to stand?
Before the spine becomes a question mark.

Who measures the weight of hunger
when the scales are tipped
before the counting begins?

The land knows its own wounds,
the way water remembers
every dam built against it.

They say poverty is a debt
but who holds the ledger?
Who decides whose lives are collateral?

The air is thick with the unsaid,
the unasked, the forbidden arithmetic
of survival.

There is no number for grief,
no currency for the body’s rebellion
when it refuses to work like a machine.

Ask instead:
When does inhumanness end?
When does the reckoning begin?