“The Daughter Who Grew Through Stone” by Selahmon Jones
Image by Selahmon Jones
There are houses
where children are raised like quiet soil.
Not empty soil,
no.
But soil packed tight
with survival.
Hands that worked.
Voices that commanded.
Lessons that kept the lights on
and the body fed.
But not always the lessons
that teach a spirit
how to stretch toward the sky.
Some of us were planted
in narrow ground.
Words were scarce.
Dreams were smaller than the world.
Questions fell like seeds
onto hardened earth.
And still,
something ancient lived in us.
Something older than the house.
Older than the silence.
Older than the fear
that children must become
the same shape
as those who raised them.
The elders called it stubbornness.
But the earth knows another name.
The earth calls it
root magic.
Because roots are patient.
You may bury them.
You may ignore them.
You may press stone after stone
over the place they sleep.
Still, they listen to the dark.
They whisper with the worms.
They drink secrets from the rain.
And one day,
when no one is watching,
they begin to move.
A quiet cracking of soil.
A slow rebellion beneath the ground.
Until suddenly,
the thing that was once hidden
splits the surface open.
Green.
Alive.
Unapologetically growing.
And the parents
the ones who planted us
in the small garden they understood
look upon us with confusion.
Because we have become
something unfamiliar.
We speak languages
they never handed us.
We bloom in colors
they never named.
We stretch our branches
beyond the fences
they believed were the edge of the world.
And they wonder
how such a thing happened.
But the earth already knows.
Children are not meant
to remain the soil
they were buried in.
We are meant to become
the forest that rises from it.
So if we outgrow the silence,
if we bloom where no one expected us,
if light begins to burn
from the center of our chests,
it is not rebellion.
It is the oldest magic there is.
The quiet spell of life itself.
The spell that whispers
through roots and bones alike:
Grow.
Even through stone.
