About this episode
One Poem Only is a daily ritual: one poem, center stage, just for now.The mind unmaskedAliyah MorayoMy 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 wo
