The Hollow Crown: Esther and Naomi

She wore her crown like silence wears a scream—

Too heavy with the weight of unshed tears.

Esther, the jewel the empire could not break,

Was taught to smile for every life at stake.

She danced in robes the color of regret,

A queen made weapon, waiting in a net.

And Naomi, with grief etched in her name,

Had lost her sons to hunger, time, and dust.

Once sweet, her name now tasted like the grave,

She called herself the bitterness she gave.

But still she taught a foreign girl to stand,

And still she reached with trembling, ancient hands.

Their bond was not of birth or holy law,

But sorrow shared—the bond the gods foresaw.

Esther, the silent, learned from grief's embrace,

That love is war without a shielded face.

Naomi's heart, though worn and cracked with years,

Became the forge for courage laced with tears.

They met not in the scrolls but in the wind—

A whisper shared between the living tombs.

"You speak for all who knelt to rise again,"

Said Naomi, hands calloused from the dead.

Esther, all glitter, all permissioned light,

Touched the hollow of her throat and did not cry.

The crown was heavy not with gems, but ghosts—

Each weighed the women they could not protect.

Naomi knew the cost of being left.

Esther knew the price of being chosen.

Both bore their people like a second skin.

Both mothered nations, not by birth, but blood.

No temple sang the praises of their names,

But Esther burned through palace blood and flames.

Naomi shaped the girl who dared the king—

The ghost who taught the phoenix how to sing.

Now see them both in twilight's sacred hush:

One voice in scrolls, the other in the brush

Of every girl who bears the world's great weight

And walks it still, despite the hand of fate.

The lion does not roar in every storm.

Sometimes it hums behind a curtain's fold.

Sometimes salvation walks on shattered feet

And looks, at first, like only being seen.

By: Mis Maria Lancelot