“Daughter of the Unseen Fire”

Written by Selahmon Jones Image by Joël Goubillot

Before my bones learned language,
before ink touched the edge of my name,
there was a house
where silence sat in the father’s chair.

His eyes were windows
that never opened.

He spoke of daughters
as if we were kitchens,
as if our hands were meant
for soap and surrender.

He did not know
that stars were hiding in my throat.
He did not know
the river in my spine
had already chosen its own direction.

So I grew
in the shadows of a man
who never once looked up
to see the forest rising in his child.

And oh,
how a daughter will climb mountains
for the sound of a father saying,
“I see you.”

I built temples of effort.
I braided poems from thunder.
I laid my paintings
like offerings at the altar of the world.

Still,
his silence remained a locked door.

But time,
old grandmother time,
placed her wrinkled palm on my shoulder
and whispered:

“Child…
You were never meant
to shrink yourself
until a blind man could recognize the sun.”

So I gathered my scattered light.
I pulled my name from the dust.
I stood in the ancient wind of my mothers
and understood at last:

I was never a daughter
waiting to be chosen.
I was the fire
they could not name.

And the world,
this wide, breathing world,
has already begun
to see me.