In shadows taken, at the age of seven,
A stolen light beneath a sunless heaven.
The world outside, a memory growing cold,
A silent story, in a cell untold.
Seven long years, the clock a broken sound,
No laughter here, no safe or hallowed ground.
Then the sudden light, the prison door undone,
At fourteen years, beneath a stranger sun.
A ghost returned to a life no longer there,
Haunted by whispers and the weight of air.
The freedom was a cage of a different design,
Filled with the wreckage of what used to be thine.
The scars unseen, they etched a different fate,
A fragile soul, burdened by fear and hate.
The world moved on, but he remained behind,
Tangled in webs that held his heart and mind.
Just a decade lived, after the chains were shed,
At twenty-four, he joined the silent dead.
A fleeting candle, burnt out far too fast,
A life of fragments, of a shattered past.
The tale is told in numbers, stark and brief,
A quiet end, a final, sad relief.
(Five-year-old Timothy White, whom Steven rescued from his child molester, Kenneth Parnell, was one of Steven's pallbearers at age fourteen)
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