-- Original Poem By Devi Mboto

Brows burdened with the knowledge of distant lands,  

creased by scriptures not your own,  

inked in histories that forgot to name you.  

Eyes which see and know all

drowned like silver pearls,  

dimmed beneath a foreign sun,  

taught to witness, never to be.  

the child of ten thousand faces,  

ten thousand lives in ten thousand places  

fragmented across borders unseen,  

carried in blood, yet silenced in tongue.  

Where is that child now?  

lost and alone,  

a vagrant laid far from their home,  

head bowed to the gospel of quiet survival:  

Be smaller.  

Be softer.  

Be unseen and you will endure.  

So you unravel  

Not in violence,  

But in surrender.  

You pale the marrow of your memory,  

rinse heritage in the slow forgetting,  

bleach the self until it gleams. 

acceptable,  

unquestioned,  

unknown.  

A burning soul in a drowning land,  

taught that to breathe  

is to become the water.  

and so  

you sink without struggle,  

drift without name,  

eyes lowered  

lest they betray the vastness within.  

yet even in submersion  

there is a stirring.  

A fracture in the stillness,  

a whisper beneath the weight:  

you were never meant to vanish.  

for in passing reflections  

in echoes of laughter unbroken,  

in voices that rise without apology 

you begin to remember.  

not alone  

never alone  

only scattered,  

like constellations denied their shape.  

A world of many tongues,  

Yet you thought silence was safety.  

a world of many faces,  

yet you believed yours must dissolve.  

but no  

you were not made to disappear into the whole,  

but to alter it 

to be the pulse within it,  

the rhythm it could not erase.  

Rust remembers gold.  

and so do you.  

The child returns 

not as they were,  

but as they always have been:  

waiting.  

unashamed in their fullness,  

untranslated,  

unsoftened.  

They do not ask why you left

only if you will stay.  

so you lift your head 

slowly,  

as though relearning the weight of the sky 

and the storm does not strike you down.  

it parts.  

for you were never too much  

only too present  

for a world that asked you to dim.  

time loosens its grip,  

its quiet command to endure, to shrink, to wait undone.  

You were never too late to find yourself.  

only hidden  

beneath the careful art of survival.  

alive   

in every fragment  

that refused erasure.  

so stand not softened,  

not silenced but whole.  

and let the world adjust  

to the truth of you.  

And So I say to the flickering flames, 

Of the souls burning with unrest to conform,

Burning in the Nightmare,

Stay out of time.