They won’t write books about them.
No stage lights warm their name,
no headline lists the ways they didn’t fail.

They learned early how easily
love can be taken,
how doors close loud behind children,
how the past waits patiently
to be repeated.

And still
they chose differently.

They created lives
where nights were quieter,
where someone knew
what tomorrow would bring,
where the language of forms and files
was not the only way to belong.

No one called that incredible.

They broke the pattern quietly,
with packed lunches and familiar routines,
with showing up when it was hard,
with staying when leaving
would have been easier.

Later, they become the elder
every child deserves,
the steady chair,
the open door,
the proof that harm does not have to repeat.

These lives don’t make the list.
They don’t sparkle well in talks about resilience.
But this is where the work was done.

Not in who escaped the fire,
but in who stopped it spreading.

And until we learn to tell that story too,
we will keep mistaking the rare for the real,
and calling it hope,
while missing what truly changed the world.