Is it harder—to cradle a child, or cast a bomb

of grief upon another’s village?

We sip from ash-cracked bowls,

hope seeping slow, between dawn and dusk.

We sing our children lullabies of gunfire,

rock them in scorch-stained stories—

still, this hut remains our home:

a sanctuary of burnt names,

where bread tastes like ghost tongue, but blame endures.

They peeled away our brown-skin pride,

laughed as we stood—statues carved of fear.

Our silence roared more fierce than sneers;

we hushed our voices just to survive.

We stitched native words behind clenched teeth—

smuggling revolution through folds of time.

We buried laughter beneath school desks,

trading grandmothers’ songs for spelling tests.

Chalk dust spelled conquest—not connection.

Mirrors betrayed us—

reflecting faces we were taught to shun,

as if our bones were borrowed and names were errors to erase.

We prayed in calloused lips,

drank from wells that cursed our rivers filthy,

and learned to love ourselves

only when whitened by approval.

Yet still—we whispered stories in secret,

braiding history into lullabies colonizers never learned.

In back kitchens and broken churches,

memory danced between fire and famine.

We are not the wound—we are the weathered scar

that stretches without splitting, the limping village that still rises.

Now, our children ask:

Why does sorrow taste like salt

and sound like silence?

We answer—not with rage,

but with hands reaching forward.

Even in ash, a whisper dares to rise:

in the telling, a new kinship forms—

we teach our children not to fear the flame,

they’ll build a legacy—one that burns the shame.