A World on Fire

I was born into a world already on fire.
The skies stitched in smoke before I learned to say my name.
History cracked like a fault line beneath my crib,
and the lullabies were sirens softened by my mother’s hum.

The air always tasted a little like burning.
Ash settled on our rooftops like old gods watching.
We played among ruins and called it childhood—
hopscotched over headlines no one wanted to explain.

They handed me matches before meaning,
told me to “dream big” with soot in my lungs.
Taught me how to hold my tongue
while the world held wars in its teeth.

I learned to pray to something quieter than fire.
Not heaven—
but my grandmother’s hands,
wrinkled maps of every land we had to leave behind.
She said: even a blaze can’t eat memory,
if you bury it deep enough in your spine.

I come from people who carried sparks in their pockets,
lit candles not for mourning, but for warning.
I come from exile braided into resistance,
from love that never asked for permission.

They tried to call this survival.
But we called it dancing.
We made drums out of ribcages,
hymns from the howls.
We wrote poems inside the smoke
and passed them like secret seeds.

I was born into a world already on fire-
but I was not born to burn.
I was born to build,
to bear witness,
to hold the last ember between my teeth
and whisper: not yet.

Not while we’re still breathing.
Not while the wind remembers our names.
Not while children still draw forests with green crayons
and believe it’s real.

So I gather the ashes.
I plant them like prayers.
I water them with rage and honey.
And somewhere, something grows.