Tell me –
What alibi does gravity need
To pull a body down?
Why must I prove the ocean
Before I say I’ll drown?
No thunder needs a jurist’s seal
To split the sovereign sky;
No winter begs permission
Before the gardens die.
The river never hurries,
Yet kingdoms learn its name.
It doesn’t conquer all at once.
It wears the throne away.
The moon has never touched the sea,
Yet still it bends the tide.
Distance has no mercy
When the force lives deep inside.
Some tempests wear a quiet face,
A practiced, vacant stare.
They sit inside the ribcage
Like a church with no one there.
The rafters drip with old despair,
The floorboards softened out,
Where every prayer grows moldy
Before it leaves the mouth.
The steeple points to empty blue,
Still begging for replies.
No bell announces ruin
When the saints refuse to rise.
Beneath the surface, pressure gathered,
Fault lines practicing their hymn.
No seismograph took measure
But the earth still broke within.
Some sorrows are subterranean,
Old rivers under clay.
They do not ask permission
Before they wear the earth away.
There are aquifers of anguish
Under every laughing field,
Deep catacombs of water
That no surface will reveal.
Some wounds arrive without a bruise,
Some storms refuse a sound.
A house may stand immaculate
And still be burning down.
A locked door is still a doorway
To a room concealing war;
Not every buried kingdom
Leaves its bones above the floor.
Not every wound announces blood,
Not every grave has stone.
Some coffins learn to walk upright
And call their silence home.
The garden smiles in sunlight,
Still rotting at the root.
By the time the branches blacken,
No spring can bargain fruit.
A bridge gives out in seconds,
But not because it chose.
It carried every silent strain
No traveler ever knows.
You only count the moment
The branches meet the ground.
You never hear the thousand cracks
That never made a sound.
A star can spend its centuries
Collapsing out of view.
Still, distant eyes call nothing wrong
Until the darkness blooms.
Its absence stains the heavens
Before the world sees proof.
Yet still they argue with the dark
And doubt the wound’s own truth.
Must every wound present a knife,
Must ash confess a flame?
Why search the room for evidence
Before you speak its name?
Must sorrow leave a signature
In salt upon the floor?
Must ruin wear regalia
Before it’s called a war?
Who asks the blood for witnesses
Before it’s called a stain?
Who cross-examines quicksand
For swallowing the terrain?
Who asks the dark for evidence
Before it earns abyss?
Who argues with the shadows
For daring to exist?
And still the world demands a ledger,
Some inventory of ache,
As though a soul must file its ruin
Before it’s allowed to break.
Who calls the pain a rumor still
Until it stains the sleeve,
As if a wound must bloom in red
To make the hurt believed.
So spare the courtroom questions,
The autopsy of pain.
Not every famine bares its teeth.
Some starve without display.
No one blames the shoreline
For yielding to the sea.
They only mourn the houses
Where families used to be.
See how the estuary
Unthreads the sovereign shore.
Not conquest, but attrition,
Until the coast is shore no more.
The mountain owes no motive
When stones begin to slide.
Some graves are built in daylight
With the mourner still inside.
So tell me –
Why is silence evidence
That nothing hurt at all,
When even stars collapse unseen
Long before we see them fall?
What indictment must be carved
Across a sunken sky
Before the world believes a soul
Can vanish while alive?
