The sky was never quiet.
Even in stillness, it breathed
like a man waiting at the edge of his resolve.
We walked beneath it, heads bent,
shoulders carrying more than rain.
The first winds came with no announcement.
A whisper at the edges of fields,
tugging at shirts,
lifting skirts of wheat and dust.
The old men looked up.
The dogs stopped barking.
And still, no one said the word.
It is not a thing we name easily.
It lives in the marrow,
grows slowly behind the eyes.
You feel it when a man watches another suffer
and turns away.
You hear it in the silence
after a neighbor is taken
and no one knocks,
no one asks,
no one breathes too loudly.
The storm begins this way—
not in thunder,
but in fear passed hand to hand
like bread gone stale.
The kind that hardens overnight.
The kind that cuts the mouth.
A boy is beaten in the square.
They say he spoke too freely.
No one saw.
Everyone saw.
A woman weeps into her coat
because her husband is no longer a man
but a name on a list
scratched out by fingers
with no fingerprints.
The clouds thicken.
They do not come all at once.
They gather the way soldiers do—
first a few at the edge of town,
then more behind them,
then silence.
Someone paints a symbol on a door.
Another tears it down.
But someone else puts it back.
This is how it begins:
gesture after gesture,
until even the paint carries weight.
There are those who say:
it is not our fight.
The trees do not pick sides in the wind.
But they forget—
even trees fall
when the ground gives out beneath them.
The air changes.
It thickens with the things unsaid.
The kindling of memory.
The old injuries, never healed,
dressed up as law,
as order,
as duty.
The radio says everything is fine.
The grain is strong this year.
Exports are good.
The ration lines are orderly.
But we know.
You can hear it in the footsteps
of the man who walks too softly
for someone with nothing to hide.
One night,
a flame blooms in a warehouse.
They say it was faulty wiring.
But the wiring was not the thing
stored in boxes marked “surveillance.”
Someone laughs.
No one joins.
The clouds roll deeper.
Thunder presses against the skin
like a warning not yet spoken.
And the people walk faster,
shoulders hunched,
as if they can outrun it.
But storms are not outrun.
They are endured.
Or they are faced.
The boy’s mother speaks at the market.
Her voice is low,
but it carries.
She says:
they cannot beat us all.
She says:
we are more than we fear.
She says:
this is still our country.
No one replies.
But the fishmonger hands her an extra cut
without charging.
A man with a limp nods, once.
That is how it begins, too.
We are told not to gather.
We are told to trust.
We are told the storm is only weather,
and the government is the roof above our heads.
But when the roof leaks—
and it always leaks—
what are we to do
but build something else?
The lightning cracks across the valley
like a voice too long held back.
It does not ask permission.
It does not seek forgiveness.
There are those among us
who remember the old stories,
the ones that no longer pass inspection.
They speak of dignity
as if it were still currency.
They speak of truth
as if it could be traded in the open.
They speak of resistance
as if it were not already alive
in every clenched jaw
and every pen held too tightly.
Children no longer draw suns in the corner.
They draw bars.
They draw men without faces.
They draw birds in cages
and color them red.
The wind comes hard now.
It strips the trees bare.
It howls through alleyways
where whispers once curled
like smoke.
We are not told to fight.
No one says “rise.”
But we are told to kneel.
And that, too, is a kind of order.
The ones who still stand—
they are few.
But they begin to look taller
in the failing light.
A farmer refuses to pay the extra tax.
His fields are burned.
His hands, though—
they remain calloused.
They remain fists.
A soldier goes missing.
His boots are found beneath a bed
in the home of a teacher
who once wrote poems
now banned for saying too much
about silence.
We are told the storm is ending.
The state assures us
all is well.
But the sky knows.
And so do we.
There is a sound to it now,
the storm.
Not just thunder.
But breath.
But footsteps.
But hearts that no longer wait
to be told when to beat.
No leader appears on the hill.
No horn calls us forward.
But we look at one another
and begin to understand—
we are the wind.
We are the pressure.
We are the sound before the breaking.
The storm does not ask us to win.
It asks only that we do not
close our eyes
as it arrives.
Let it come.
Let it tear down
what was never built for us.
Let it rain.
Let it wash the names from the walls.
Let it cleanse the silence
from our mouths.
The storm is not coming.
The storm is here.
And we—
we are still standing.
Broken Author 