Poetry by Solape Adetutu Adeyemi 

They told us to but did not say where. Makoko demolition

They told us to go,

but did not say where.

So we lifted our lives in our hands like bowls of water,

already spilling, already thinning,

and waited for the ground to appear beneath our feet.

But the ground was a question.

The water was a memory.

And the air was full of orders with no directions.

In Makoko, houses learned to float because the world beneath them refused to stay.

Wood balanced on water,

corrugated roofs leaned into the sky like tired shoulders,

and children learned the language of paddles before the language of books.

We built our prayers on stilts.

We cooked hope over open fires that trembled with every passing wave.

We slept listening to the lake breathe.

Then the machines came,

with teeth of iron and voices of authority.

They spoke of development,

of danger,

of removal.

They spoke in straight lines and legal papers,

while our lives were written in circles of tide and time.

“Go,” they said.

As if “go” were a place.

As if “go” had a door,

or a bed,

or a name.

Wood cracked.

Nails screamed.

Roof sheets folded like wings that forgot how to fly.

The water swallowed what it had once carried,

not gently, not slowly,

but with the hunger of something that had been commanded to erase.

Mothers clutched cooking pots like lifelines.

Fathers held silence in their fists.

Children counted the planks of their homes as they disappeared,

one, two, three—

until there was nothing left to count but waves.

Homelessness is not only the absence of walls.

It is the absence of tomorrow.

It is the way night stretches when you no longer know

where morning will find you.

It is the cold that enters the body

and refuses to leave.

It is being told you do not belong anywhere,

and being given no map to prove otherwise.

They told us to go,

but did not say where.

So we stand between water and sky,

carrying the weight of a place that no longer exists,

yet refuses to die inside us.

Makoko still floats in our chests,

in the rhythm of paddles,

in the smell of smoke and fish,

in the songs that rise even when the houses fall.

We were not moved.

We were unrooted.

And the earth, like the water,

is still deciding

where to let us rest.