Runes for the Unpaid Debt

Intro

Grandmother kept the ledger in her apron, every number a name

Every name a mouth she fed on nothing but her own frame

Said the debt don't die, it just change hands like a scar

Verse 1

Midnight shift at the cannery, hands pruned white and split

Sorting what the machine missed, every second counts for shit

Thirty years she stood that line, never called in sick

Said the body's got a contract written in arithmetic

I was seven when she showed me how to thread a needle through the pain

How to let your fingers bleed and still come back again

She kept a jar of coins beside her bed, each one was earned

Told me every quarter's got a story, every story burns

The foreman called her "steady," never knew her given name

Said the turnover was the profit, loss was just the game

But she built a house on overtime, on nothing but her will

Raised four kids on what they threw away, and raised them still

I count her hours like she counted coins—the math don't lie

She paid a debt she never owed just so we could rise

Chorus

I wear the weight she carried, every scar's a stitch

I wear the weight she carried, turned the poor to rich

I wear the weight she carried, blood and brick and grit

I wear the weight she carried, that's the only gift

Verse 2

Brother came home with a trade license, hands calloused like concrete

Built apartments for the people who owned the street

Said he learned it in the system, learned it slow and hard

Every nail he drove was breaking someone else's yard

But the work was work, the money was real, the pride was there

Even if the men above him barely knew he cared

I watched him teach his son the same—the grip, the stance, the way

To make something solid from the nothing of the day

My mother took in laundry, starch and steam and fold

Kept the creases sharp as razors, stories left untold

Her back bent like a question mark nobody asked

But every pressed shirt walking meant she'd made it last

We don't speak about the ledger, but we feel the weight

Every meal, every morning, everything we make

Chorus

I wear the weight she carried, every scar's a stitch

I wear the weight she carried, turned the poor to rich

I wear the weight she carried, blood and brick and grit

I wear the weight she carried, that's the only gift

Bridge

The debt ain't money, never was

It's the hours traded for the trust

It's the borrowed time, the borrowed light

It's the ones who broke so we could write

Verse 3

Now I'm holding down my corner, doing what I said I would

Paying forward every lesson learned in struggle and in blood

The ledger's in my DNA, the numbers in my bones

Every debt paid down in sweat is how we build a home

They say the system's rigged, and maybe that's the truth

But I saw my people rig themselves and pull each other through

So I stand where they stood standing, hands still open wide

Ready for whatever comes, I got them on my side

Outro

The ledger never closes, just passes down the chain

Every name a testimony, every mark a name