My voice was a seed sleeping under centuries of shadow.
The world spoke loudly,
but my words walked softly
like footsteps on sacred sand.
Silence lived with me then-
not cruel,
only patient like an old baobab
watching centuries pass.
It told me:
Stillness is safety.
So I stayed within a quiet cage,
woven not from iron
but from fear's familiar fingers.
Yet dawn is a stubborn storyteller.
One morning
the wind wandered through the grass
whispering wild, wandering wisdom.
The river answered in ripples,
and the sky slowly opened
its wide blue book.
Then I understood:
A bird is not born
to memorize the shape of bars.
The lock loosened
like dry leaves leaving a branch.
My voice rose gently-
not thunder,
but a soft song of returning.
Joy came to sit beside me
like sunlight on river water.
Once I lived under a sentence of silence,
but now my sentences breathe.
And the cage,
that quiet teacher,
became an allegory of forgotten courage.
Now I walk beneath the patient African sky,
a free bird
carrying the calm
of an opened door.