One Poem Only is a daily ritual: one poem, center stage, just for now.
The mind unmasked
Aliyah Morayo
My mind carries centuries.
The rust of chains sits where dreams should bloom.
It remembers the songs my ancestors could not finish,
the languages drowned beneath the ocean,
The prayers that reached heaven but never came back whole.
I carry the scent of burning villages,
the hush of mothers hiding their children from soldiers,
The taste of iron in blood is not yet dry.
History is not behind me,
it lives beneath my skin,
in the way I flinch at loud footsteps,
In the way, I still ask permission to exist.
Poverty came next, not the kind you can see,
But the one that eats through dignity.
It teaches you how to smile while shrinking,
How to apologize for breathing air you didn’t pay for.
I have held hunger in my stomach like a secret,
watched promises rot in the mouths of politicians,
and called it governance.
Racism doesn’t need chains anymore.
It wears suits now, sits in boardrooms,
and signs papers that erase faces like mine.
It whispers in hiring rooms, in classrooms,
In the silence after a joke that was never funny.
My skin still walks into rooms before I do,
And sometimes it leaves bruises.
And there was the night I lost my body.
Hands that were not mine mapped me without mercy.
They called it desire,
But I learned that silence can sound like survival.
They told me to forgive,
as if forgiveness could sew me back whole.
But my body remembers,
every breath, every tremor, every theft.
Sometimes I dream of a woman,
barefoot, heavy with history,
a pregnant silhouette against a red horizon.
She carries nations in her womb,
grief and hope braided in her hair.
The earth listens when she walks;
Every step is a drumbeat,
Every contraction is a prophecy.
She births children into a world that greets them
with both fear and promise,
each cry echoing a memory that refuses to die.
And the men in suits still speak of progress,
while the roads collapse and children starve.
Corruption wears perfume now,
It smiles on TV, it calls itself democracy.
The poor grow thinner,
their bones become statistics,
Their stories are buried under asphalt and applause.
The mind remembers it all
the rape, the racism, the hunger,
forgetting.
It remembers how it learned to pretend to be fine,
how it stitched its wounds with hope too small to cover the pain.
It remembers prayers that turned to smoke,
dreams that suffocated before they could fly.
But unmasked,
The mind does not lie.
It bleeds truth.
It exposes the scars beneath the laughter,
the trembling beneath the strength.
It holds everything the world tried to bury, and still dares to breathe.
And somewhere, that pregnant woman still walks.
Barefoot and unbroken.
Her belly glows with the ghosts of centuries,
her breath carries the songs we’ve forgotten to sing.
When she finally gives birth, the world will tremble,
because the child will come out screaming, not in pain,
but in remembrance.
And that, perhaps,
is what it means to be unmasked,
To remember, to ache, and to live still.
More from Aliyah Morayo ↓
- @aliyah_morayo on Instagram
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Write After: National Poetry Month with One Poem Only
Write After is a way to encourage poets to listen and write, and use National Poetry Month to highlight how listening to poetry makes us better poets. I know I write the best when I’m surrounded by beautiful poetry–it’s part of the reason I created this podcast, and I want to encourage others to share this practice.
We'll get started in April. You can share to #WriteAfterOPO.
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