I AM A MAN

        A poem
   ~ Kwado Ezza
       [19/07/2025]

I am a man.
The first son of my father.
The bearer of burdens too heavy for words,
The chosen warrior in battles I knew nothing about.
I rise each day not to eat,
But to search,
For a kernel I did not inherit.

In this life, some people wake up to tables already made,
Their yams softened by ancestral fïre. Their kernels already cracked for them by benevolent spirits.
Many had to wake up and crack their kernels by themselves.
Their paths cleared by the feet of spirits.

But for me?
I wake to wilderness.
No kernel waiting to crack,
No oil in sight,
Only challenges that dares me to carve meaning from lack.
I have to wake up,
Search for the kernel before cracking it for myself, for my parents, and for my own family.

But I do not complain.
I only wonder:
Shall I return to my mother’s womb,
That warm cocoon before sōrrow called my name?
But even that is a door forever shut.
So here I stand, nāked before the gods,
Carrying a name that must not fall.

I am almost forty.
No child calls me father.
No woman calls me love.
Not because I do not want it. Not because it’s my wish,
But because of the cruel hands of fate.
That cruel sculptor that
Carved me from dry clay
And left me in the sun to harden alone.

I have nothing,
But I have life.
I have woünds,
But I have will.
I weêp for myself in silence,
But I breathe with purpose.
Because I am a man,
And I will not dïe small.

If poverty is a yoke,
Let it prepare to break.
For I was not born to crawl forever.
I will find my kernel.
I will crack it with bleëding fingers.
And when my children come,
They will not know this hunger.

I am a man.
Not by age or by choice,
But by the wàr I fïght everyday with a quiet face.
I am a man,
Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.
#NdulanuOlulanu

||©️Kwado Ezza.