Shattered Mirrors

They hand us a mirror, but it shatters in our grasp,
each shard reflecting a smaller truth,
a sharper lie.
Left and right, good and evil,
a binary dance choreographed to divide.

We speak in slogans now,
easy words for complicated wounds.
One side cries, oppression!
the other shouts, tradition!
Each deaf to the music of nuance,
each convinced the other is a shadow
to be purged by light.

Splitting starts small —
a crack in the glass,
a thought too fragile to hold its complexity.
Soon, the fault lines run deep:
Us versus Them.
Virtue versus vice.
Human faces reduced to masks.

Cancel the heretic,
cheer the saint.
But today’s saint wears yesterday’s scarlet letter,
and today’s heretic was once a hero.
We forget the arc of redemption,
the messy climb of learning,
as we flatten people into two-dimensional frames.

Algorithms feed the flames,
showing us what we already believe.
Each scroll tightens the circle —
an echo chamber that sings us to sleep.
We dream of righteousness,
awake to division.

Projection is our weapon:
we aim our insecurities at others,
call their fear irrational,
their anger misplaced.
But isn’t the mirror cracked for us all?
Don’t we each see monsters
where humans stand?

What is lost in this?
Empathy, eroded by certainty.
Dialogue, silenced by outrage.
A nation, a world, split by imaginary lines
drawn in the sand by unseen hands.

If only it were simple:
if evil were a distant enemy,
a shadow cast from someone else’s soul.
But the line dividing good and evil
cuts through the heart of each of us,
winding through the hollows we dare not touch.

Who can destroy a piece of their own heart?
Who can hold the jagged mirror to their chest
and not bleed with the truth?

We are not saints or sinners,
not villains or heroes —
just people with fractured hearts,
trying to hold the world together.