Cold
They say the child grows teeth in the cold,
learns the language of hunger before words,
counts silence as a kind of answer.
No one notices at first
how absence settles into the bones,
how a hand not held becomes a fist.
In classrooms where help is rationed,
where difference is filed as disruption,
a girl learns to shrink her voice
until it cuts.
A boy is told he is too much
too loud, too slow, too wrong
so he becomes exactly that,
because what else is left
when belonging is denied?
We build systems like fences,
call them order, call them fairness,
watch the most fragile hands
bleed trying to climb them.
And still we ask —
why the anger?
why the fire?
But cold is a teacher that does not soften.
It carves. It hollows. It sharpens.
It whispers: take warmth, or make it.
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So the village trembles
at flames it helped to kindle
at windows lit not by welcome
but by warnings.
This is not about monsters.
This is about children
we chose not to see.
Because love was inconvenient.
Because care was too costly.
Because someone said
they would grow out of it.
Listen:
There is still time to build hearths
instead of wildfires.
To widen tables.
To rewrite what “support” means
so it is not a battle,
not a begging bowl,
not a mother on her knees
trying to prove that her child is worthy of help.
There is still time
to choose tenderness
before survival turns feral.
But if not
do not be surprised
when the cold we ignored
returns as fire.
And do not call it senseless
when it was, all along,
a search for warmth.
