PoeticalVibe Post — THE RECKONING
by Al Konda
There are poems that come gently, with a whisper.
This is not one of them.
The Reckoning came like smoke under a closed door —
the kind you smell before you see the fire.
I wrote it with a weight in my chest that wouldn’t let me breathe.
A weight born not from fantasy, but from watching what is happening around us —
how entire cultures are being reshaped, erased, rewritten
by those who believe the future belongs only to them.
This poem is not about a specific place or time.
It is about the pattern that keeps repeating:
-
conquerors who think fire makes them immortal,
-
merchants who drain meaning until nothing sacred remains,
-
voices silenced, names cut in half,
-
children taken, memory targeted,
-
a people forced to survive in the dark corners of the world.
And yet—
the poem is also about what refuses to die.
You see, power misunderstands one thing:
When you destroy everything a people can hold,
you force them to hold their truth inside.
And what is hidden becomes indestructible.
This is why the last lines matter so much to me:
Those who pass through devastation’s gate
learn how to burn without being seen.
That is the spiritual core of the poem.
Not victory.
Not revenge.
Not even hope.
Endurance.
A form of sacred resistance that leaves no flag,
no monument,
no inscription—
but cannot be erased.
I wrote The Reckoning because I needed to remind myself —
and maybe someone else —
that even in the worst seasons of human cruelty,
something survives that no empire can extinguish:
the inner flame.
The one that refuses to bow.
The one that remembers.
The one that keeps walking.
If you carry that flame, even quietly,
you are already part of the lineage this poem speaks for.
Thank you for reading,
for feeling,
for keeping your own fire alive.
— Al Konda
Read the full poem and analysis tomorrow 12th: https://alkonda.com/2026/01/12/the-poem-of-the-day-92/