POV: Rukia
Pairing: None
Author's Note: None. Feedback is always appreciated.
Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach.
The Forgotten Children
Hard-scrabble life
Taste the dust
And your own poverty in your mouth
Coating you lips with its grime
As night draws nearer
Hunger grows roaring
And long in the tooth
The monster that can not be denied
We march, we fight, we stretch
Out our fingers and hands
Imploring to no avail
Snatching our lives away
From Hunger and the man with free fists
Autumn comes in a flurry of tawny leaves
Then winter decked out in snow
No one looks at the rag-clad beggars crowded like cordwood in the alley
And traipsing the streets filled with melting snow
Our skeletons form like twigs and keys
Fragile things that bend and break
And do not last the night
And in the winter months
When icicles grow on the eaves
Hoshi, a delicate blue-eyed girl
Small and pretty, all of nine years old
Tugs my skirt and solemnly says, with her childish lisp and her cheeks chapped red
"I am going to work with my mother",
Beneath the grimy West-Side bridge
I am the only one who cares
We are the beggar children
Of Inuzuri:
Servants, beggars, street rats
Nightwalkers,
Laborers,
Thieves,
Things with no shadows
That no one ever sees
