What Does Not Falter Poem by Henrietta Ezegbe

Softness,
bent under pressure.

Fracture expected.

Collapse,
misread as endurance.

Breaking anticipated
as evidence of form.

Instead, structure held.

Not hardness.
Not absence.

Alignment
under force.

Attempts to interpret yielding
as disappearance.

But yielding was never absence.
It was recalibration.

Each boundary
re-asserted
without announcement.

Each refusal
quiet, exact, final.

Steel, they said,
for lack of better language
for what does not dismantle under pressure.

But steel is not the point.

The point is continuity
without distortion.

A self
that does not negotiate its shape
to remain visible.

Toughness, mistaken for precision.

Structure, mistaken for distance.

What proved difficult to read
was not absence of feeling

but refusal
to be rearranged
by it.