The Solitary Pavement Urchin…

A solitary child poor and tattered
A forsaken spirit in the city’s rush
Her presence carved
Into cobblestone pavements
Like whispers of a forgotten tale…

Orphaned and ignored
She wandered the Labyrinth
And maze of alleyways
Her frailed cardboard shelter
A fragile impregnable fortress
Against the cruel winds
Stappled pins braving the typhoons…

Malnourished and weak
She endured on fragments
Of compassion and alms
Scattered by strangers
Her eyes once shimmering
With wonderstruck gape
Now held a distant gaze
Akin a mirror reflecting
The indifference surrounding her…

The world hurries by
Faces burried in newspapers
Umbrellas shielding hearts from rain
But she persevered her small hands Outstretched and palms upturned
Pleading for a coin and
Selling tit-bits there…

To most she was unseen
A whisper in the city’s chorus
But beneath the grime
And rustic torn clothes
A dampened spirit glowed
A flame of resilience
That dares to be snuffed out…

Her ill bleak fate
Alike the city’s choking smog
Hung heavily in the air
Would her life be a mere shadow
Fading into oblivion
Or could she challenge
The harsh destiny
Given by insensitive fate…

In the quiet spaces
Of her cardboard refuge
She wove unfulfilled stories
From discarded newspaper threads
Crafting a warp and weft of hope
She whispers poems to the moon
In unrhyming sonnets
Her ruffled voice
Lost in the city’s orchestra
Of sirens and footsteps…

She seems alike me
A poet abandoned
To the pages of dusty books
Living on words sold here
Verses traded there
Could she find solace
In ink-stained lines
Find kinship with the forgotten souls
Who dreamed in quiet desperation…

When rain drummed
On her cardboard roof
She and I weren’t so different
We were both wanderers
Seeking warmth
In the coldest nights
We were both dreamers
Weaving threads of beauty
Into our lives upholstery…

Our stories would meet
A serendipitous encounter
In life’s margins
Where poetry blossomed
Even in the pavement’s cracks
The street urchin
A delicate vase
Amidst the towering city
Holding within her
The fragile hopes
Of forgotten dreams…

As long as she lives
As long as her heart beats in sync
With pitter patter of rain-soaked nights
She is more than invisible
She is a whispered promise
That even in the darkest places
Hope could take root and blossom
This lonely street urchin
On the solitary pavement
Has a dark story to dispense
Which none wants to discern…