This poem stands at the intersection of memory, guilt, and witnessing. It refuses comfort and clarity, choosing instead to remain with difficult truths—about power, pain, and responsibility.

Moving through personal reckoning and collective reality, the poem treats suffering not as metaphor but as evidence, returning again and again to the place where silence once felt easier than honesty.

Truth Standing in the Fog

I didn’t arrive to explain myself.
I arrived because staying away
was another lie.

Inside this fog,
past and future share a pulse.
Guilt breathes with them,
changing names,
but refusing exile.

This poem is not an apology.
It is a question that won’t behave.
It digs.
It keeps digging—
until I am led
to a locked room in my chest,
where silence has been
practicing its breath.

Hatred is not loud here.
It is old.
Its hands shake.
Its voice forgets itself.
Still—
it clings to being right,
even while losing.

Look closer.
The woman is not an idea.
She carries history in her spine.
The child is not tomorrow—
he is the raw nerve of now.
The worker is not a metaphor;
the world stands
on his uncelebrated sweat.
And wealth—
it is not shine,
it is distance,
measured by who gets to look away.

That is why this pain
does not feel imagined.
It files reports.
It leaves fingerprints.
It becomes evidence.

The power of this poem
is not escape.
It does not run.
It returns—
again and again—
to the place
where fear is most articulate.

This poem does not soothe me.
It seats me
across from the truth—
no curtain,
no water,
no excuse.

And maybe this is literature:
not making us better,
not making us whole,
but making us
bold enough
to face the truth,
and fight
for a new beginning.

(Vijay Verma)
www.retiredkalam.com

Categories: kavita

Tags: #creativity, #emotion, #Life, #Love, #poem, #poetry, #wellness, featured, Poem, writing