The crowd stood still as laws were quietly unmade,
Their tongues entombed in fearful, guarded throats;
While one lone soldier broke the line, disobeyed,
Their whispers drowned in his dying notes.

The first to fall we left out in the cold—
Their causes strange, their battles not our own;
We turned aside as wickedness took hold
And cast them to their fates, forgotten, unknown.

Then others fell like roses fed to flame,
By our self-chosen art of staying blind;
We bore, we said, no portion of the blame—
This tyranny, we swore, would smolder out in time.

But silence is a contract struck with night,
A covenant with devils we pretend to deplore,
The chains we forge grow merciless and tight
From every truth we fooled ourselves to ignore.

The cage falls shut on all we did not say,
Not with our protest, but our still consent;
For silence cuts its verdict into history,
And we become the evil we’d prevent.