My granddaughter leans over a science book,
small fingers turning pages of centuries,
eminence stamped in coloured ink, discoveries crowned,
a parade of brilliance in one swirl.
“Nanna, they’re all men,” she says,
not loudly, not accusing…
just noticing the pattern;
the way children notice rain.
Then, a sideways glance at me,
mischief and truth tangled together:
“I think they peeped at the ladies’ ideas
and took them for their own.”
She is five.
Already, she reads between the lines
that history’s men forgot to write.
Tonight, a man with titles heavy as iron
leader, commander, voice of consequence,
declares a whole civilisation will die
before the dark is done.
His words fall like warheads splitting the night,
cities turn to ash in his mid-breath,
not just maps erased in a single flash.
And I think of her…
…of bright, unguarded seeing,
of questions not yet trained into silence.
I wish he could peep, just once,
into her clear and fearless mind,
borrow her instinct for fairness,
plagiarise her simple, radical truth:
that power is not in seizing,
nor in claiming what is not yours to claim,
nor in naming destruction as destiny,
but in noticing who is missing,
and making room for them to speak.
Who has all the power?
The ones who write destruction into presence?
Or the girl child who writes her future into being?
Latansani 