The Flour mill

Poverty is not just suffering-

it erases a person’s identity, dignity, and future.

She does not know the beauity  of her wheat skin-

only the pallor dust has made her own,

a breath of ash that settles in her lungs,

a whiteness worn more deeply than her skin.

***

The mill persists,an unrelenting will-

its iron throat consuming hours and bone;

each turning stone inscribes upon her hands

the grammar of a life reduced to toil.

***

No dawn attends her with a gentler name.

I call her thus-the maiden made of golden grain,

for she is bound to what she cannot taste,

and shaped by what she labors to sustain.

***

They number sacks yet never reckon need,

they weigh the flour but never measure worth.

Within her, hunger ripens into fire,

a slow, consuming argument with flesh.

***

No bread is hers, though bread is what she makes;

she feeds on dust that settles at her lips,

as if the body, schooled in long denial,

might learn to live on absence made to seem.

***

Her wages are the residue of work:

the sifted stones, the chaff, the useless husk.

By lantern’s failing light she winnows late,

the wind repeating what her voice withholds.

***

That sound,drawn thin across the empty fields-

resembles grief unspoken yet endured,

a fractured music carried into night,

as though the dark itself had learned to weep.

***

The air is burdened not with dust alone

but with the gaze that lingers, weighs, and strips;

for poverty makes fragile what it keeps,

and virtue walks exposed to nameless hands.

***

So she must vanish where the fields remain-

where wheat still bends beneath an honest sun,

before the world, in its familiar hunger,

lays claim to what it has not yet consumed.

***

The mill goes on,indifferent, exact-

reducing youth to matter without name;

yet somewhere in the silence it has made,

a seed persists, resisting its design.

***

And she may rise; beyond this choking white-

her voice restored in something like a dawn;

no longer ground to dust or given less,

but held at last in what she might become.

***

Or else remain;what labor has defined:

a body thinned to hunger and to bone,

a life returned in fragments of itself,

and named by loss the world will not recall.