Poem: The man who wouldn’t be sold!

By Arian Galdini

In an age that paints its wounds with borrowed light,

where a voice goes cheaper than bread,

and silence is kept like a rare thing

on tables that have never known hunger,

there still walks a man

no one turns to watch,

because he owns no platform,

stands under no bright lamps,

has no chorus at his back,

yet in his chest he carries

a piece of sky, folded with care,

like an old letter from home.

He comes back late,

his hands worn down,

his back full of the day,

with dust and iron settled in his face,

and still he sits beside his child

as beside a small altar

where the future draws its breath in silence.

There, quietly, his stature begins.

Not on a stage,

not in the clamor of victories,

but in the way

he will not let his heart

be priced for the market.

He has seen the cities

built on the nights of the just

until they ceased to astonish him.

Faces smiling with the teeth of fear,

men who know how to serve the hour,

who measure a man

by what he owns,

not by what he has saved from himself,

have passed before him

like shop windows in a market

where everything has a price,

except that other man,

the one who loses without kneeling,

who breaks without being bought,

who keeps his name

like a low-burning lamp

that does not decorate the night,

but defeats it.

His only shield

is that untouchable part

that never enters the auction.

He does not bow

to evil well dressed.

He does not call light

what merely shines.

He does not lay his hand

on what would make him richer

by making him less a man.

And when time drives its claws deeper,

when loss reaches the marrow,

when the world whispers

that it is too late

for what cannot be bought,

for what must not be let go,

for what stands upright even alone,

then, precisely then,

he enters his highest trial,

like Christ

at the center of pain,

bearing in silence

what must not be let go.

For a man is measured

not by how often he passed through untouched,

but by how often he rose

without handing over to the dark

his name,

his child,

what he believed,

until his face

had nowhere left

to return.

Arian Galdini