You don’t have to bother about giving the waters in your mouth.
You don’t have to fulcrum a river’s flow towards convergence.

In my home, a babel language–– foreign to my acoustic nerves.
Talk of the future, everyone is always saying something.

Everyone thinks there is a messiah in their home. Because blood
rains more often than rain, elegy is what we sing here. How old

was I when they call me a bird with a happy song? I think 9.
I was to lead a choir past a boneyard to bliss. Here I am––

the queen of silence. My voice has never grown tall
past a damselfly’s antennae. I did not choose to be this stunt.

There’s something always numbing the cuteness of a firefly.
There’s someone always holding stillness towards my choral wings.

On no occasion has it been me schooling old men seated around
an iroko tree about tech. What about greyness do I have to tell gray hairs?

The prophecy remains unfulfilled, my grandpa reminds me:
You will speak someday & the red sea will snow. At the seashore,

I await the fulfillment like a man in anticipation of his ancestors
in a slave ship. All I can say is, the river will flow in its own time.

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY

Miracle Amarachi Chierigo is a budding writer, a student of Jewel Model Secondary School, and a member of Hill-Top Creative Arts Foundation, Abuja. She was a finalist for the 2025 BCD Utulu Prize for Literature, the second runner-up in the On-the-Spot Poetry Competition at the 8th edition of the Hadiza Ibrahim Aliyu Schools Festival (HIASFEST), and the first runner-up in the INYIPE Spoken Word Competition.