Title: Voices In The Shadows Poem by ashok jadhav

(The speaker stands in a dim corner, voice raw and trembling at first, then rising with fierce defiance. Their eyes dart between imagined oppressors and an unseen audience.)
Monologue:
Do you see us?
Do you even notice?
We walk these streets, we live these lives,
and the world passes us by like we are nothing.
Invisible. Silent. Forgotten.
They call us outcasts, misfits, undeserving.
They tell us our voices do not matter,
that our pain is small, our struggle… meaningless.
And for years, I believed them.
I swallowed their lies. I hid. I bent.
But the wounds… the wounds do not disappear.
The anger does not vanish.
It festers. It grows.
And yet… we survive.
We survive because we have no choice.
We endure because even in darkness,
we carry sparks of who we are.
We are more than their labels. More than their judgment.
We are flesh, we are blood, we are voices
that will not be silenced forever.
One day… one day, they will hear us.
They will feel what we feel.
And they will know that the marginalized, the outcast,
are not weak. Not broken. Not invisible.
We are here. We endure. We rise.
And if the world does not bend, we will break it.
(The speaker steps forward, chest heaving, eyes blazing with defiance, refusing to remain in the shadows any longer.)