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This poem will be written in paragraphs. Long breath-like paragraphs. Because lives do not unfold in tidy lines. Because hunger speaks in paragraphs and mercy needs more than one inhale to be believed. Because some truths stagger, then stand, and we must follow their gait. Because memory returns in waves, not bullets, and justice arrives when love has room to gather itself. Because a child’s name deserves a whole page, not a footnote.
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‎Let these stanzas lean on each other like neighbors at dusk; let one sentence hold the next by the wrist. From this braid of breath, walk with me into a vow:

‎I swear to God, if my voice was a law, Almajiri boys would not beg beneath scorching sun and burning skies. Their bowls would not be graves of hope but lanterns of becoming.  They would read poems on classroom floors, their bare feet tracing the rhythm of reform. Their fingers stitching letters into nations yet to be born. Each letter a small door opening into daylight like answered prayers.
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‎I swear to God, if my voice was a law, the streets would whisper verses of reform, and every cracked wall will sing hymns of possibility. And every bowl held out in desperation would become a cradle for dreams. And empty promises would no longer choke futures before they breathe.
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‎I swear to God, if my voice was a law, the girl who fears her voice would rise like water breaking stones. And the boy who fears his dream would rise like dawn undoing the dark, a kite tugging free from the clenched fist of wind, reclaiming voices of dreams once buried in silence.
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‎But the law in my country is like a drum without skin—loud in promise, hollow in justice, a chorus of men who legislate hunger and baptize despair. The law in my country is like a drum painted with justice and stuffed with rags; it makes noise when elections come and sleeps when hunger speaks. It is a ladder pulled up by those who climbed it, an umbrella that opens only indoors. The law in my country is a masquerade in daylight, dancing in borrowed robes of justice, its laughter fed by the cries of the nameless. It builds prisons before it builds playgrounds, it writes decrees in the ink of forgotten children.
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‎[drops pen]
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Photo by Bilal Abdulkarim on Unsplash