by ©2025 Samantha Syrnich
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
— Emily Dickinson
I have walked through fire
that should have silenced me—
yet here I stand,
breath steadying
into something holy.
My life has been a gathering
of shattered things:
trust splintered,
faith shaken,
roots pulled from the earth.
But still,
somehow,
I learned the language of rising.
I have loved with hands still trembling,
given kindness even when the world
offered none in return,
and carried strangers through nights
I barely survived myself.
If all I’ve lived through
becomes a lantern for someone lost,
if my story eases even one pulse
straining under the weight of this world—
then my existence has mattered
in the quiet,
immortal way
truth always does.
Let them say of me,
when the last page turns:
She did not survive for nothing.
She used her wounds
as wings.
And her life—
though heavy,
though carved by storms—
was never lived in vain.
— Samantha Syrnich
The Phoenix Quill: Words Born of Fire, Inked in Truth 