The Weight of The Lines

These carved rivers on our faces
Are called beauty, as though pride
Could be carved out of misery.

Each line represents a boundary
And a map of our perceived identity.
Yet the world sees them as fractures,
Fault lines splitting us from belonging.

I walk into a room,
And their eyes are needles,
Stitching shame into my skin.
Their laughter turns a storm,
Unrelenting, without refuge.

These marks are cages,
Keeping me tied to a past
I never agreed to carry.
The elders say, “You are tradition,”
But I am only the silence
Of a child who couldn’t refuse the blade.

How do you unwrite what is carved?
How do you explain
That this culture they honour
Is the weight we carry,
Dragged behind us like a shadow?

We are mosaics cracked by time,
Fragments of an identity
That does not fit the world we inhabit.
Each glance, a question we cannot answer.
Each whisper, a wound that doesn’t close.

Yet even in this,
We are not just scars.
We are stories,
Unfinished and jagged,
But ours to reclaim.