Midst of War and Commerce

 Shadowed halls where profit teaches law,

We learn to trade the breath of living souls.

They call it progress, call it honest trade,

And sign their names while distant cities burn.

The ledger smiles though ink is mixed with blood,

Each number clean, with skulls between the lines.

They sell us peace with carefully shaped words,

While iron hulls depart before the dawn.

Steel passes hands like coins still warm with skin,

The deal is sealed as bones are bought in bulk.

A clerk looks down and counts without a pause,

As hope decays in crates of numbered lives.

The weak are shadows priced and quietly weighed,

The strong become both law and final judge.

Success is carved from silent, nameless loss,

And failure buried deep beneath the ledge.

Screens glow with maps that flicker red and green,

A distant flash of flesh reduced to marks.

We ask how come the cities burn in fire,

Then nod when profits rise and call it sense.

At home we sleep beneath electric calm,

The cost displaced as children scream abroad.

We bless the deal and look away from pain,

Call darkness light and wrongness something wise.

Yet in the hush beneath the market’s hum,

A quieter truth refuses still to bow.

A voice of courage firm though rarely heard,

Insists on peace that cannot still be sold.

It speaks not loud of power, growth, or gain,

But names a love no currency can bind.

A seed of good though fragile learns to stand,

And dares the storm that commerce cannot price.

Amid the chaos still that hope remains,

No scale can weigh it, no account erase.

The choice to heal, to rise above the trade,

And give the human soul its rightful place.

Let this be heard beyond the noise of gain:

No price can name the worth of human breath.

The future waits on what we choose to guard-

Not gold or fear, but life, or nothing left.

This poem is not an accusation of individuals, but of systems we’ve allowed to speak in our name.

It asks us to notice how easily suffering becomes abstract when profit gives it a ledger entry instead of a face.

"Peace that is bought with distance and denial is not peace."

"Progress that requires forgetting the human cost is not progress."

The world does not change because cruelty is exposed--it changes when ordinary people refuse to accept cruelty as normal, necessary, or inevitable.

"The choice remains, quietly and stubbornly, with us:

to value life where it is least profitable,

to speak where silence is convenient,

and to remember that no market gets the final word on what it means to be human."