Silent Streets, After Closing

 

“The streets remember what the world ignores.”

Dawn’s thin hush, the alley holds its breath,

Cardboard keeps the heat of borrowed sleep,

Old walls remember meals the city missed.

The streetlight hums above forgotten bags,

A folded box waits under tired steps,

Night leaves its answers near the curb’s edge.

They call this place a map of what is gone,

They name it waste and turn their faces up,

As if the ground forgets who walks it first.

We learn the language written on the street,

Which bread is kind, which hunger still forgives,

Which hour has not yet hardened into loss.

Hands weigh the mercy of a broken meal,

A slice untouched, a cup still warm with care,

Food loved once more before it’s understood.

This is not theft, nor desperation’s mark,

This is attention sharpened into skill,

Reading the city’s careless overflow.

Kneeling, we practice dignity in dust,

We clean the lid, we split the better half,

So no one eats the night completely alone.

They say this silence means that nothing lives,

But listen close-patience has a pulse,

Hope learns to cut without drawing our blood.

We are not made of lack or empty names,

We are the proof that living still insists,

Worth does not end where tables disappear.

When morning floods the streets with sound again,

Our careful traces vanish into light,

No record keeps the math we did with breath.

Yet streets remember what the world ignores,

They hold the weight of lives that will not bow,

Endurance moving softly, still awake.

When words like waste at last collapse and fail,

What rises is not silence, not debris,

But voices saying still: I am more here.

“Hunger taught me patience before it ever taught me pain.” -Jayankarthika