Better My Egg. Poem by Daruweshi MKULUWANYIKA

In our village where dust remembers footsteps,
and gossip travels faster than the wind,

I walked each morning with an egg in my palm, small, pale, silent, unhatched,
as though the sky had lent me a private moon.
The children laughed.
The women at the wells hid smiles in their scarves.

The men beneath the acacia trees shook their heads,
as if I had chosen poverty with open eyes.

"Look at him, " they said,
"he guards a silent shell like a crown."
But I loved it. I guarded it.

For in its stillness, I found something the village had forgotten, peace that does not shout.

Across the path lived my neighbor,
a man whose pride arrived before his greeting.
He kept a leopard behind iron bars.

By day it wore obedience like a borrowed skin,
soft eyed, lowered-necked, almost holy.

Visitors praised him.
Elders called it mastery.
Children pointed in awe.
"See how the wild has been tamed, " they said.
But night was honest.

When darkness unbuttoned the sky,
the creature remembered itself.
The lamb fell away.
It slipped through gates that knew its name.
It crossed fields like a silent debt.
It took from goats, from stores, from sleeping homes, not hunger, but habit.

And before dawn, it returned
to rest its crimes at the feet of its master.
The neighbor grew rich on the silence of others.
Yet each morning he locked his doors twice,
kept a spear within reach,
and listened, always listened to the breathing of the thing he called tame.

I watched.
My egg warmed quietly in my hands.
Then one night, pride miscounted its chains.
The village split with cries.
Torches rose like judgment.
We ran.

There, beneath broken iron,
the leopard had stopped pretending.
It was not a symbol anymore
only teeth, only hunger, only truth.
When iron met fire,
the night ended.

They saved the man,
but what returned to his house
was no longer a master.
Only a lesson still breathing.
Days passed.
Silence returned to the village
like a tired guest.
In my hands, the egg trembled.
A crack thin as a whispered promise.
Then life answered.
One chick.

Then another.
Then more than I could count.
They filled my yard with small insistences
feathers, hunger, sound.
They grew.
They multiplied.
They gave without spectacle.
And when seasons hardened
and fields forgot to yield,
it was my quiet yard
that fed louder mouths.
Those who once laughed
now stood at my gate more gently.
Not because I had spoken.
Not because I had claimed victory.
But because something simple had answered the years,
something that did not hunt them in the dark.
And the village learned, slowly,
what it had mistaken for weakness
was only time choosing its own way to speak.


18/5/2026
Daruweshi Mkuluwanyika.