By Tana Poppy Isabella
The garment was clear and innocent.
It held ambitious dreams, a wide-eyed gleam,
a dauntless spirit,
and cosmic dreams that knew no bounds.
It shimmered with purity,
believing the world to be an ocean
of warmth and kindness.
It danced in a garden
where the season was always spring.
But little did it know
doomsday stood just minutes away,
hidden in the folds of a clandestine midnight.
The moment it surrendered to sleep,
drifting into dream’s enchanting lullaby,
a cold hand crept beneath its warm layers
and stained the clear, spotless garment.
It quivered.
It soaked in silence.
It trembled with tears that had no voice.
Yes, those were the threads soaked in shadows.
But how could it tell the world
that it was stained?
Those glacial creeping hands
had the power to fray ambition,
to shred trust into ribbons.
Spring vanished.
Monsoon bled through every seam.
So it wrapped itself in layers of silence.
It learned to mimic ignorance
because the world offered community
only to what it pretended not to see.
To know less
was to remain
a luxurious,
clear, untouched garment.
Years unraveled.
It brushed past others in bustling places,
a sheen of smile across its fabric—
though its hem hovered near collapse.
Still,
it wore the veil of ignorance,
clinging to the fragile feeling of belonging.
Until one dawn,
the tears it had hidden
spilled into a flood.
They swept the crowd,
inviting nothing but
furrowed brows and frowning eyes.
“Poor thing,”
was all it heard.
The stain, they said,
was hideous to sight,
a shameful view—
better shrouded.
So it learned:
hide away,
or cloak the stain
beneath new fabric.
To wait for the thread of justice
or the warmth of acceptance,
was like waiting for Godot.
An arrival deferred in perpetuity.
The world, it learned,
was a haunting masquerade.
No one knew
if another garment had weathered desert winds
or drowned in a tsunami.
The garments spun past each other,
spinning in rhythmless grace.
And it danced too,
twirling through a masquerade
threadbare under borrowed light,
stitched in silence and shame,
where grace knits itself
with verses of grief.