A figure stands in shallow water under a dark sky, and almost nothing happens. That is the first thing to notice about "Cursed" by shinigami__kun. There is no plot, only a few facts set down flatly: the sea has taken his parents, it has taken his voice, and it has left marks on his feet. The central idea comes in the last two lines. Grief that cannot be spoken does not disappear. It moves into the eyes, and the poem asks us to read those "empty eyes" as the loudest thing in it.
The form suits that idea. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines read almost like plain prose, many of them sitting alone on the page. The short sentences ("All light gone." "He didn't ask for them.") arrive like a list of losses read out by someone who has stopped expecting sympathy. Then the rhythm breaks. The unspoken sentence, "Even if you touch my feet a thousand times, I won't forgive you for taking my parents," is the longest in the poem. It runs on like something held in for years and finally let out, though only on paper. Right after it comes the shortest and heaviest line: "It had stolen his voice." The long outburst the reader has just heard turns out to have been silent, and the placement makes that sting.
The poem's most unsettling choice is its vocabulary of presents. The scarred feet are "adorned" with "jewels" that he was "gifted on his birthday." The word returns twice more: "The scars weren't the only thing he was gifted with. / He was gifted with loneliness." Set against this is the verb used for the sea's other actions, "stolen," which appears for both the parents and the voice. The poem sets generosity against theft and lets the reader see they describe the same events. The cheerful language is bitterly ironic, and it explains the title. Nobody in the poem says "cursed," but the word hangs over every "gift." The poem also never says who is giving. It leaves the sea as the obvious suspect, which makes the birthday detail more haunting. A day meant for celebration becomes the day something was done to him.
The imagery works through contrast. The sky is dark and "All light gone," yet the water is "sparkling." That sparkle can only be the sea's, so its beauty seems indifferent or even mocking. Judging by the imagery, the sea is also treated as a person. He speaks to it as "you," and the "thousand" touches against his feet read like a persistent, almost pleading gesture that he refuses to answer with forgiveness. His feet are "naked" and "delicate," which makes the "permanent" scars feel like damage done to something that had no protection.
The closing quotation changes the poem's register. It is unattributed and sounds like a proverb: "There is a scream of the mouth and lungs, and a scream of the eyes and soul. If the former gets no response, the latter begins." We are not told whether it is the narrator's reflection or a saying the boy has absorbed. Either way it sends us back to the first line. The staring, "empty" eyes were never really empty. They were screaming the whole time, and we were reading the scream without recognising it. The poem therefore ends where it began, now with a different meaning, and that circular shape suits a grief with no resolution.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it relies on loudness. It never describes the loss itself, the sea at its worst, or the moment the parents disappeared. It shows only the aftermath: a body, some water, a silence. By handing us the words he cannot say and then explaining where that unspoken pain has gone, it makes the reader the one who answers. In the poem's own terms, a scream that gets no response keeps going, and the reader is the response it has been waiting for.