The Silent Land
by Joy Pepito
1.
I once sought the Silent Land—
where shadows, thick as honey, cling,
and in the stillness, I lay down
my soul, heavy as the unspoken words
of a world that has forgotten me.
I thought, I shall turn night into a feast,
I shall carry the sun in my hands
and burn without fear of fading.
Seven times seven my shadows whispered,
Seven times seven my stars receded,
Yet, seven times seven, I stepped forward,
dragging my threadbare thoughts like chains.
At sorrow’s edge, I laughed,
and the wind carried my grief—
only to return it as voices
weeping behind every step.
2.
I arrived at the gates of my own destruction,
where silence lives and swallows all.
No more words, no more masks;
only the truth of a body so tired
it trembled with its own absence.
I sought to meet myself—
not the girl I had lost,
but the one who could stand
before the hollow.
3.
The guardian waited, silent as stone.
“What do you seek, O Sun-who-dimmed?”
“To find what is buried in this body
that trembles in the dark.”
“Then pay the price,” he said.
“All who enter must give—
a name, a breath, a heart…
and your tears are too many to count.”
4.
I tore myself bare at every gate,
not with grace but with a hunger
that out-screamed any prayer.
At the first, I laid down my voice—
once a river of song, now dust.
At the second, my hands—
once strong enough to hold the earth steady.
At the third, my eyes—
blinded by the white heat of hope.
At the fourth, my thoughts—
severed sharp, a clean wound in the skull.
And by the seventh, nothing remained.
Yet silence, insatiable, demanded more,
and I vanished inside its mouth.
5.
“What remains of you,
daughter of fractured skies?”
I had no tongue to answer,
only a body fraying into ash.
“You are not worthy,” they thundered,
and their laughter split the dark—
a blade of frost,
undoing the last fragile thread
of hope I had carried
into the silence I thought I could master.
6.
For three days I drifted,
suspended between shadow and light,
drowning in the hollow music of my bones—
until a hand, gentle as dusk,
found what was left of me.
Not a savior,
but the hush that follows thunder,
when rain falls like blessing, not blade,
when the earth exhales at last,
slow, unbreaking, alive.
7.
And from that dark, I rose—
not the girl who once burned herself to ash,
but a fire tempered, unyielding,
a steady blaze that carves through shadow,
lighting the corners where only the daring will enter.
Each step was defiance against oblivion.
Each breath, a strike of flint—
a spark wrested back
from the silence that would have devoured me.
8.
Now, as dawn gathers its gold,
I carry the remnants of the storm—
not its thunder, not its ruin,
but the stillness that endures after breaking.
I am both tomb and awakening,
pilgrim and return.
I live—
tender as a bloom at the lip of winter,
unyielding as a flame
that refuses extinction,
burning even here,
in the Silent Land that once unmade me.
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