Oh My Chest (A Lament for the Unheld)

Oh,
my chest
inhales
the weight
of every child’s pain.

All the hunger.
All the labor.
All the bruises.
All the cold.

The soul-fractures
of the orphaned,
the unloved,
I carry them
like breath
too wide
for lungs.

Like the softest petal,
crushed
by the turning
of the world—
by the silence
of those who look
but do not see.

Every cry
spreads—
widening,
echoing
across the lands
where lament
has replaced
sheer joy.
Where “human”
has not yet
been born.

Or worse,
lands where God
is a statue
of forgetting,
a name
divorced
from tenderness,
from mercy.

Agony,
it ululates
in the bone’s abyss,
where no sense
dares go,
where no comfort
has ever lived.

Oh,
my heart,
my trembling furnace...

I beg of you,
endure.

Endure
the unending.
Burn,
like only stars
know how.

For this ache,
it isn’t just pain.

It is the moon’s
own grief,
dipping his face
into darkness,
bursting
in cry.