the paths my siblings left 😪

You ask why I dare to speak of crowns, As if "royalty" is a word my tongue should not know. But while you were cradled in the soft lilt of nursery rhymes, My mother was feeding me the marrow of history. I did not grow up on fables of "once upon a time." I grew up on the maps of men who drew their own borders. My bedtime stories were the tactics of the conqueror, The iron-willed silence of the victor, And the heavy, rhythmic heartbeat of empires. My DNA was altered before the first breath. I looked at my siblings and saw not playmates, but benchmarks. They did not leave me a childhood; they left me a precedent. They built the ceiling so high that I had to grow wings just to breathe. In our house, failure was not a setback it was a foreign language That my mother refused to translate. So, do not tell me "royalty" is a foreign word. It is the only language I was taught to speak. I do not seek the crown because I am vain; I seek it because the history on my bookshelf Demands that I either outmatch the greats Or become the dust they walked upon.