12 Years a Slave

The Long Span

In a village of iron‑bound hearts,
the land was a grid of green and bruise;
his name, a syllable of iron, was carved into the oak of the days that would never choose,
and he walked like a shadow where the sun dared not arouse.

Twelve years, the bell rang one after another
in a world that turned its wheel on a tongue of “slave.”
His voice, once a wind across the prairie, was silenced under a master's key,
whispered in corners where whispering echo shaped the grave.

Hands that once held a compass, now crept with the weight of chains,
each link a memory of a dawn that could not be taken.
Within each hollow of the heart, a sigh that carries the taste of old rain,
for freedom is not a line drawn in stone, but a dream truly awaken.

And still, his eyes were the seas that know no ship’s horizon;
they held the fierce defiant glow of a man who refused to starve the soul.
Against the cruel winter of subjugation, a quiet revolution;
the pulse of his conscience, the throbbing rhythm of the whole.

So remember this journey, that he endured the blackest of nights,
the sweetness of his return to a world that taught him how to fight.
Let the ballads of his story endure as a torch held high,
a testament that we all Forge our futures from the bronze of the try.