MARIPOSA

She was born of a luxury of nature,
urging the dance of my trembling pen.
She began life as an egg,
a crystal oval that accompanied the dreams of angels,
placed on the edge of a trembling leaf.
The world was too vast, the wind tickled her curves,
leading to her fall, the genesis of her biography.

The mirror broke before she knew her face,
shards reflecting a thousand versions of herself.
A view that time refused to return.
None of them whole, none of them kind.
Each piece was a reflection she mistook for the truth.

She grew to larva as time passed,
aligning each fragment as a puzzle of life,
the kintsugi of what she is to become.
Where dreams were built on the innocence of repair,
every lacquer reflected an illusion of healing.
Each memory a meal, each day a mouthful,
a belly filled with stories that a child couldn’t digest.

Days folded into years,
years into the ache of a single breath,
living as a chrysalis of a young woman.
Not sudden, not easy, but inevitable.
The broken mirror could no longer deceive her,
for she had made sense of its reflection.

She carries the memory of every stage,
formed together by metamorphosis.
An illusion to some, a miracle to herself.
For the mirror lied, she was already becoming.

Yusuf Kareem

Yusuf Kareem, a graduate of Mathematics Education from the University of Lagos. He is deeply interested in mathematics for its structure, logic, and quiet beauty. Poetry, on the other hand, found him in a more personal way. It was self learned, born from the habit of writing my emotions in words. Over time, those words became verses, and those verses became poetry. Poetry is his safe space and the lens through which he makes sense of the world, allowing him to explore thoughts and feelings that numbers alone cannot hold.