Echoes of the Hunt

She moves through morning light,

a whisper of dust motes in the sun.

But shadows, unseen,

cling to her steps like a shroud.

Eyes, not merely keen, but honed blades of scrutiny,

carve into her,

words, not just traps, but snares of silk and venom,

coil around her breath.

A cityscape, a concrete jungle,

becomes a web of grasping hands,

a silent, predatory ballet

where 'no'

is a forgotten echo,

a word stripped of its shield.

They name her prey, a hollowed sound,

a label etched in bone, not skin.

But her spirit bleeds, a battleground

where silent shrapnel tears,

not the soft surrender of a feast.

Her skin, a canvas etched with unseen script,

remembers the unspoken,

the truths that silence dared to bury deep.

Bruises bloom, not merely on the flesh,

but where the delicate tendrils of trust

once stretched towards the sun,

now withered, choked, by a sudden, brutal frost.

He, the hunter, wears the tailored cloth of power,

a scent of ambition, sharp and cold,

a perfume that chokes the nascent breath of consent,

smothering it with a practiced smile,

a handshake firm as steel.

A predator, cloaked in the ordinary,

a suit, a tie, a reputation built on sand.

Respected in the bright glare of day,

protected by the blind eyes of the world,

never a whisper of suspicion

daring to touch his polished name.

She screams.

At first, a tremor in the quiet chambers of her soul,

a whisper caught in the throat of night.

Then, a rising tide, a guttural roar

that shatters the glass of her own despair.

The walls of her confinement hold no echo,

absorb the sound, a silent burial.

But the cobblestone streets, the asphalt veins of the city,

they begin to hum, to reverberate.

A chorus rises, not of victims, but of survivors,

a molten flow from wounds that once festered in the dark,

a wildfire igniting on the urban wind –

fierce, luminous,

unbowed,

unafraid.

We rise.

We name them now, these phantoms of the night and day:

the monsters cloaked in civility,

the men who wield their power like a bludgeon,

the insidious myths that shroud their deeds.

We will not just tear down the silence,

we will dismantle its very foundation, stone by silent stone.

We will rip the veil, not just from their faces,

but from the eyes of a world too long averted.

No longer the hunted,

no longer the silent, shivering prey.

Only warriors now,

a constellation of fierce hearts,

reclaiming the shattered pieces of the night,

reforging them into dawn.