Poems by Jordan A. Leturgez

Not in the trumpet's brazen cry,
Nor crowns that catch the noon,
But in the hand held out to lift
A stranger through the gloom.

It lives where quiet courage keeps
Its promise, step by step;
Where kindness asks for no applause,
And grief is gently met.

The years may dim the marble names,
The banners fade from view;
But what we give to one another
Endures, and carries through.

The board stands still beneath the light,
a quiet dare of grain and pine;
I raise my hand, prepare to fight
the fear that says the strength is mine.

One breath, one shout, one sudden crack--
the world divides beneath the blow.
The splinters never strike me back,
but pain has ways a board won't know.

For wood is kind: it breaks, it yields,
it keeps no score, it bears no scars.
The hardest battles wait in fields
where hearts can answer who we are.

So train the fist, but guard the heart;
let courage learn what force can't prove.
A board may break beneath your art--
the living do not have to move.

At the edge of the field, the grasses  lean outward, listening  for footsteps that never arrive.

A fence holds the evening  in a trembling line--  wood, wire, shadow, sky.

Inside, the house gathers its windows,  each one a small, bright thought  refusing to wander.

Outside, the dark keeps moving,  measuring the world  with its patient, soundless hand.

I walk the boundary slowly,  touching each post  as if counting what remains.

Beyond the last stone,  there is no map--  only distance becoming night.

And still the circle widens,  not by breaking,  but by learning where to end.

Morning slips in, sparkling bright,
Polishes rooftops with threads of light.
The windows yawn, the sidewalks gleam,
The whole wide world steps from a dream.

A breeze runs laughing through the trees,
Washing the clouds and stirring leaves.
The river hums a silver refrain,
While sunlight rinses the night away.

Fresh shoes tapping, clean hearts awake,
New little promises ready to make.
Each breath feels clear, each moment keen--
A day unfolds, so fresh, so clean.

Beneath the lamps, the maps lie still,
their rivers blue, their borders red;
a dozen hands command the hill,
while somewhere far, the sleepless tread.

The radios breathe in broken code,
the clocks divide the dark by two;
each brass pin bears a stranger's load,
each silence hides what men must do.

No thunder enters through the door--
only a cup, a chair, a name.
The war is measured on the floor
in distances too small for flame.

Outside, the rain begins to fall,
soft as a hand upon the glass;
inside, they lean above it all
and move the pieces as they pass.

At dawn, the room will lose its power,
the maps be rolled, the lights grow thin;
but somewhere, at that very hour,
the first command will settle in.

A hand can move a shadow
without touching the light,
turning truth to folded paper,
day to counterfeit night.

A whisper dressed as thunder
can rattle every door,
while careful eyes keep smiling
and ask for something more.

The mirror learns to flatter,
the chain pretends to shine;
a choice becomes a corridor
with walls that call it mine.

But even buried instincts
remember how to rise--
the heart can name the pressure,
the mouth can unlearn lies.

So let the strings fall silent,
let borrowed masks descend;
what bends beneath manipulation
can break--and still transcend.

The numbers tremble on the board,
small stars beneath a judge's eye;
a whisper shifts one guarded chord,
and second place learns how to fly.

A pencil pauses, then rewrites
the weight of every earned refrain--
turning losses into silver lights,
and doubt into a measured gain.

But scores are doors, not walls of stone;
they mark the path, not where it ends.
The truest tally, kept alone,
is how we rise, and rise again.

So change the numbers if you must,
let old conclusions lose their claim--
for hearts that practice, strive, and trust
can redraw the meaning of the game.

The road to code is a ribbon of midnight and coffee,
a map sketched in semicolons and small, stubborn lights.
You step onto it barefoot, sleeves rolled against the cold,
and the first keystroke is a heartbeat -- tentative, alive.

There are forks named Syntax and Patience, loops that fold back on themselves,
and signs that read: Compile Here, Then Leap.
Errors bloom like dark flowers in the grass,
each one a riddle with teeth, a door that will not open until you learn to listen.

At first the world feels binary -- right and wrong, green and red --
but soon you meet the grey: the elegant hack, the honest bug,
the midnight mentor in forums who sends a lantern through the screen.
You learn that failure is an instrument, not a verdict,
and that debugging is a quiet kind of archaeology,
dusting away assumptions to find the fragile architecture beneath.

There are nights when the cursor looks like a metronome counting out patience,
and mornings when "Hello, World" arrives like a sunrise, small and miraculous.
You carry fragments -- an algorithm learned on a bus, a snippet remembered at dawn --
and stitch them into scaffolds that hold ideas up against doubt.

Version control is a compass; comments are the chalk on the cave wall.
Stack traces become constellations you can read,
guiding you to where your logic unhinged itself.
The community is a roadside diner, voices overlapping, recipes traded,
and sometimes a stranger's pull request is the exact hand you needed.

On this road, you build ladders from problems, bridges from repetition,
and sometimes a simple script opens a city of possibility.
Progress is measured in tiny triumphs: a test passed, a refactor that sings,
a user smiling because your lines of thought finally learned to speak.

Keep going. There will be storms named Obsolescence and Imposter,
and there will be plains of steady work where no glory passes by.
But each commit, each question asked aloud, lays a stone.
The road to code is not a line to finish but a path that teaches you how to walk,
and in walking you become both cartographer and traveler, maker and home.

Between the chandelier and the bare bulb
a rumor of light moves like a thief --
it spills in crystal and puddles on pavement,
it learns the shape of silver spoons
and the hollowness of tin.

The Haves dine on calendars of plenty,
their plates are maps with no borders,
their laughter spins like coins
and settles soft on linen.
Outside, another door breathes on cold hinges,
a radio counts the hours in static,
a child folds an empty hand into a small fist
and names the wind for company.

Glass towers mirror the sky and keep their secrets;
cardboard dreams stack like low-rise constellations,
and in the alley the have-nots stitch dusk into blankets,
each thread a story of what was carried and lost.
The rich lawn keeps its shoes clean of mud,
while other shoes memorize the cracks in the pavement,
learn the language of soles.

They measure time differently:
one house counts gold as proof,
the other marks it by the patience of waiting.
But both feel the same late hour,
the same moon--thin as a promise--rising.
Both lovers press the same thin light to their faces,
both mothers name their children aloud
as if names could keep the cold from knowing them.

Sometimes the Haves grow small from too many doors,
and sometimes the Have Nots walk like kings, crownless but upright.
Compassion is a room nobody owns,
a table that will not seat just one kind.
When hunger is spoken into a bowl, when coin is split into care,
the wall that divided softens into a threshold.

If all the world's wealth were only weather,
we would still need umbrellas and hands to hold them.
So let the sun be shared in ledger and sky:
let no one wake to an empty cup while another's overflows,
let us remember we are not islands of profit,
but a single, breathing sea, rising and falling together.

Everybody dance now --
not as escape but as answer,
feet translating grief into rhythm,
shoulders learning how to hold light.

We gather like scattered sparks
along cracked sidewalks and subway turns,
ancient and newborn moves colliding
until the pavement remembers how to sing.
A child teaches a weathered pair of hands
a step that melts the years away;
an old dancer shows a shy body
how to let its edges blur.

Hands split the air into constellations,
hips become small rebellions,
and laughter, sudden and furious,
wakes the corners that had given up hope.
The city exhales in syncopated breaths;
lamplight taps a steady beat on wet asphalt.
Neighbors inch closer, then closer still,
and language shrinks to the size of a smile.

Every stumble is forgiven by the music of feet,
every breath a tiny revolution.
We are a hundred different kinds of brave
learning, mid-spin, how to begin again.
So move -- wildly, gently, anything true --
until sorrow folds like paper and becomes warmth.
Everybody dance now:
let the world forget for one perfect song
that it was ever anything but this communal pulse.