The Price of Silence

Rise & Speak: Poetry for Justice and Hope

Silence is expensive.
It costs more than gold,
more than the weight of stolen land,
more than wages held hostage
by hands that build empires
but never own the key.

It is a debt unpaid,
stacked high in hollowed-out homes,
where children sleep hungry,
where mothers stretch hope like threadbare cloth,
where fathers drown in the weight of a world
that never lets them …