The Silence of All We Could Have Had

How many songs have gone unsung
because a child was told to be quiet?
How many painters never touched a canvas,
how many symphonies drowned in screams—
their creators too small, too scared,
too shattered to believe
they had anything worth offering?

How many cures, revolutions,
books that could have cracked the sky—
gone,
like breath stolen in the night.

It is too easy to make a child.
An accident of lust,
a moment of carelessness,
a vessel for projection.
And too easy still to ruin one—
not by breaking bones,
but by bruising belief.
By twisting love into a leash.

Parents are not gods.
But some play at it.
Some build temples of fear,
altars of shame,
and teach their children to worship
their own unworthiness.

And when that child
—silent, gifted, fractured—
grows into the shape of survival,
the world sees the quiet
but not the crime.

No one mourns
what never came to be.
No eulogies for the talents
we never got to witness.
No trials for the parents
who committed the slowest murders
with their words,
their absence,
their cold.

Only the child
carries the aftermath.
Only the child
learns to wear the wound
like it was their fault
for bleeding.

So tell me—
how many miracles have we lost
to people who should never have been
entrusted with a seed?

How many voices did we never hear?
How many minds
were taught to forget themselves?
How many stars
died before they ever
touched the sky?