This poem talks about the fallen victims of depression, who are mourned briefly but nobody ever learns from their deaths. Instead, the statistics keep rising but nobody takes an analysis and starts a conversation about preventing suicide and helping depression victims. Nobody reaches out to help them but instead judges them and their mental illness. Some of them committed suicide in spite of medication, some in spite of counseling, while the rest could never gather the guts to talk due to social stigma. Even in death, only the victims know each other’s pain.
The invisible smoke of regret,
rose above the bodies of those gone.
They had no tombstones
for their deaths were neither
prevented nor deemed valid.
They had no graves either,
corpses lying haphazardly,
half-buried under a skimmed layer
of callous condolences.
There was no sky above them
no air to burn or freeze.
Not a single scavenger to
feed on their wasting brains and bodies.
They hadn’t suffered
deaths you could see,
some of them sported scars and cuts
in places on their bodies as hidden
as their hearts,
while others suffocated
as their vacant mouths disappeared,
leaving behind weathered skin.
Some of their bodies reeked of pills,
like human bottles of medication
while others just smelled of
sadness that had struggled for so long
that it had died in desperation.
They weren’t out in the open,
they had been the hushed victims
of a taboo tragedy;
surrounded by a wall of ignorance
and indifference built by
the world outside.
They weren’t bodies either,
just a mountain of statistics
which everyone had seen
but never bothered to bury and mourn.
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