Courtesy: ChatGPT

Sonnet: The Failing State

When gilded halls no longer bear the weight
Of justice meted swift and wisdom crowned,
And speech is coin, yet truth depreciate,
In marble courts where silence is most loud;
When law, once blind, now peers with greedy eyes,
To favor those whose purse doth tip the scale,
And sirens sing in screens of crafted lies,
While hungry mouths are fed on dreams grown stale—
Then is the State no more a steadfast wall,
But scaffold warped by rot, in slow decay.
Its stewards, masked, attend the banquet’s call,
As common folk are priced and swept away.
Yet from such ash, let wiser ages grow—
A phoenix rising where the weak did sow.