After The fire

To all mothers who have lost children in war.

They said it would end,
the bombs,
the shouting,
the marching feet;
but it didn’t,
it only moved on,
and I stayed,
and I stayed,
and I stayed.

My arms are useless now.
They remember the exact weight of my son,
seven years old and sleeping,
but the air they hold now is weightless.
I wake up rocking nothing.

I found her hair ribbon in the rubble.
The pink one.
Clutched in a fist of broken wall.
I don’t know if it was left behind
or if it was all that was left.
I washed it in the river.
I wear it now around my wrist.
It is clean.
And so what?

I set four bowls on the table every morning.
Four.
Then I remember.
Then I put three away.
Then I remember.
Then I put two away.
Then I am on the floor
with the last bowl in my lap,
and I cannot remember how to stand up.

His laughter was a hiccup.
A little gasp, then light.
I would give this whole silent world
to be startled by that sound again.
Just once.
To drop a pot, to say a silly word,
and hear that gasp.

They say I whisper in the market.
I am not whispering.
I am telling my daughter a story.
She is listening.
She is four.
She asks why the sky is grey.
I tell her it’s just dust.
She believes me.
Why wouldn’t she?
Why shouldn’t she?
Isn’t a mother allowed to talk to her child,
even if no one else can see her?

And the fire—
the fire they say is gone—
it still crawls under my skin.
It burns and burns and burns,
and I tear at my own clothes.
If I pull them off, I think
the heat will leave my body.
But they say the worms have eaten my brain.
What do they know of a flame
that follows you everywhere,
even after the smoke has died?

My youngest was a seed.
I never heard her cry.
I only felt her turn inside me,
a secret promise.
Now my body grows a different thing:
a stone where my heart was.
It gets heavier.
That is how I know time is passing.

Do not pray for me.
Pray for the mother who still has
a child to brush hair from a forehead.
Pray for her hands, that they know what they hold,
that she never learns to measure silence
by the size of a room,
never feels the weight of a space
that does not answer back.

Pray for her feet,
that they do not wander the way mine wander—
aimless, circling the same patch of earth,
as if the ground might suddenly return
what it took,
as if a familiar footprint
might bloom under the dust
and call me home again.

Pray for her ears,
that lullabies do not turn into echoes,
that the small breaths she counts at night
do not one day become
a sound she has to imagine,
a sound she cups in her mind
because her arms
have nothing left to cup.

As for me—
I am past prayer.
Past the soft promises
people send into the sky
like lanterns.
I have watched too many lights
float upward
and come back as darkness.

I am a house where every room leads
to the same empty room.
Every doorway is a wound
that asks the same questions:
What was once here?
Who was once here?
How can absence sit so heavily
on a chair,
on a bed,
on a mother’s chest?

I walk in circles inside myself,
opening doors that open into doors,
a hallway that lengthens
even as I stand still.
And all of them chorus the same thing;
the same thing I cannot outrun,
the same thing that fills the house
more than breath ever did.

If you see me staring,
I am watching them.
They are right there.
Building a fort from chairs.
Drawing on the wall.
Asking for water.
And I ask myself:
how far can memory stretch
before it snaps?
But then the dust settles,
and the wall is just a wall,
and my mouth is full of their names,
and I have to swallow,
and swallow,
and keep swallowing.

_Majekodunmi O. Ebhohon is a Nigerian poet and playwright. He is the author of ‘The Great Delusion’, winner of the ANA Prize for Drama, 2025. He writes from Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria.
_sankara101010@gmail.com_