Shortlist Saturdays: The Music of Birds in Exile by Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi

The Music of Birds in Exile

with a line from Romeo Oriogun’s poem: Cotonou

mama is not dead.

she sits under the plum tree beside my window.

she’s a bird with prominent feathers; she’s a girl of fifteen

she’s just like me—broken and beautiful

her eyes are armed with letters from the past:

darts of war and hunger splitting the bowel of cities in halves.

tonight, mama calls me by name: Sochima.

the river in her voice drowns the ache in my chest. her face wears

the iridescence of the moon. in her eyes, a thousand shooting stars

spring with the weight of what they know—deep yearnings yoked in baskets of time.

on her hand, I trace planets of fresh warmth,

memories pulsating with every intake of breath—the first time

I said mama with the guttural inclination of a child

from her body I drank the first sun and morphed into a garden of promises.

mama’s voice is a guitar strumming broken chords

the earth under our feet is a mouth humming

the wind drums the tale of bodies meshed in love and loss.

tonight, a trickle becomes a deluge

tonight, my body learns the music of birds in exile

she takes me through a door in her eyes and

we amble down a valley of bones—

a long line of women singing their loved ones to the afterlife

women carrying the world and their dreams in chapped palms

tonight, my mother teaches me how to carry my dreams—

in jars of wet clay she mends the rift on my

tongue and weaves a new language

a girl is a mirror to the world, she says. a fine mix of blood and water and fire.

mama breathes into me and I become dough—

a pile of soft white batter she cracks open with her fingers.

I watch her knead me into several shapes—versions of myself tucked in a box

versions I revel in. she runs me through the furnace

and I do not melt. she says a girl must be both silk and rock to

survive the manliness of the sun. it was dawn, and i rode into the clouds with new wings.

Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi is a writer from Ebonyi State, Nigeria. A finalist in the 2024 Gerald Kraak Prize, he's the author of the short story collection, While The World Slept, forthcoming from Win's Books Publishing, on the 22nd of July, 2026.