Written piece
Thread of Waiting.
Nelson Kasungulu
Zambia
About this piece
“A poem deflecting on war, poverty, displacement, and rural hardship, exploring the shared human hope for redemption, peace, and a better future despite suffering and abandonment.”
Thread of Waiting.
We wait beneath broken skies,
where smoke writes sorrow across the air we breath, and
where children learn the language of hunger
before they learn their names.
In places torn by war,
the earth remembers every footstep fleeing to the middle of nowhere but suffering.
Mothers carry silence on their backs,
wrapped beside empty bowls and fading prayers.
Across forgotten villages,
the roads end before hope arrives.
Rains leak through tired roofs,
and lanterns tremble against endless nights that See's Children uncovered and suffering.
Farmers bend over wounded soil,
planting tomorrow with blistered hands,
while seasons change without mercy,
and rivers retreat from thirsty lands.
Some wait in refugee camps,
counting days by the sound of distant gunfire and days of moving from one camp to the other.
Some wait in clinics without medicine,
watching fever steal breath from the weak.
And still the world keeps turning,
crowded cities glowing beyond the darkness,
while the poor stitch survival together
with threads too thin to hold despair.
Yet deeper within these suffering places,
a whisper continues to rise:
Someone will come.
A redeemer for the abandoned.
A voice for the forgotten.
A hand to lift nations from dust and countless dead bodies.
Flies feed on the dying and the dead without mercy.
A light strong enough
to enter every ruined home.
So people keep waiting.
Not because suffering is small,
but because hope refuses to die.
And perhaps the first thread of redemption
is not thunder from the heavens,
but the moment humanity remembers
that every broken life
belongs to us all.