In the land where fire once danced in drums,
A path curls behind the cassava grove
No signposts mark it,
Only the hush of old women’s songs
Carried by the breath of yam smoke.

There lies a shrine beneath a mango tree,
Stone by stone,
It remembers more than the textbooks do.
The ancestors' voices,
Faint as rain on thatched roofs,
Still murmur in the dust,
But no one listens.
No one looks twice.

The oil men came with maps,
With hungry drills and foreign tongues.
They saw only profit,
Not prophecy.
They paved over sacred soil,
Called it progress
And left the earth to bleed
Black tears into forgotten rivers.

A boy once sat by the poisoned creek,
Carving meaning into a calabash.
He asked why the gods were quiet.
But the gods were not quiet—
We had just stopped hearing them.

These are the places:
A grandmother’s clay pot, cracked but clean.
A fisherman’s song in twilight.
A rebel’s grave under a plantain leaf.
A language spoken in secret
So it won’t die by daylight.

Philosophers debate from high towers,
But truth hides in goat paths,
In footprints left at dawn
By barefoot girls who carry stories
In baskets on their heads.

The world passes by,
Eyes wide shut,
Blind to the fire in forgotten embers.

But if you look again
Really look
You’ll see altars in every anthill,
You’ll hear sermons in silence,
And know that power often wears no robe.

For it is in places where no one looks twice
That the soul of a people endures
Waiting not to be rescued,
But remembered.