Written piece
Untitled
Lilian Jere
Zambia
About this piece
I was born where love forgot my name,
Where even the wind whispered shame.
Before I could stand, before I could speak,
The world already decided I was weak.
They named me shadows, thick and cold,
A story of rejection I was told.
Too dark, too heavy, too out of place,
Like I had n
I was born where love forgot my name,
Where even the wind whispered shame.
Before I could stand, before I could speak,
The world already decided I was weak.
They named me shadows, thick and cold,
A story of rejection I was told.
Too dark, too heavy, too out of place,
Like I had no right to a smiling face.
At home, love wore the face of pain,
A cycle of hunger, silence, and chain.
My mother prayed where no one could see,
In the bush where only God heard her plea.
So I learned to run when voices grew loud,
To disappear inside fear like a cloud.
Not because I was lost or small,
But because I needed air at all.
I was laughed at before I was known,
Left in rooms where hope had flown.
Even my body became their joke,
But my heart… my heart never broke.
It whispered softly through every night,
“You are still here. You will rise to light."
And in that voice, so quiet, so true,
I found a strength I never knew.
I went to school with broken things,
Broken shoes, broken dreams, broken wings.
But still I walked, still I tried,
Even when everything in me cried.
I was betrayed, I was left alone,
Carried a child while still not grown.
And yet through storms I learned to stand,
With shaking heart and steady hand.
For every time life dug my grave,
I grew instead of being its slave.
Through pain I learned what I could be,
Not what they said, but what is me.
They called me nothing, that much is true,
But nothing was the soil I grew into.
And now I rise, not soft, not small,
But proof that broken still stands tall.
I am no longer what they see,
I am the story that set me free.