Two poems by Chidimma Ewelukwa

A Heart That Multiplies

No one notices

when the day begins inside her.

Before the kettle remembers its song,

before the window quite let in morning,

she is already gathering scattered hours

into something the family can live inside.

She carries invisible things –

an appointment no one else will

remember,

a sweater already folded once into a

schoolbag,

rain waiting somewhere without warning.

She makes an apology

for arguments she did not begin,

simply because peace

has learned her name too well.

There are afternoons

when silence follows her

from room to room,

not like loneliness exactly,

but like another task

she has not finished.

She wonders, briefly,

who she was

before every thought

began with someone else tomorrow.

Then a laugh cuts through the house –

too loud, to alive to ignore.

A voice calls, Mum.

Just that.

And something in her shifts –

not fixed, but pulled back together

in a way she cannot explain.

She does not mistake love for ease.

She knows it is built

the way rivers worry stone:

slowly, without witness,

until every hardness begins to change shape.

The First Shelter

Long before the first lullaby,

before blankets, before names

stitched into fabric

that will never stay clean,

she was learning

what it means to hold something

that does not yet have language.

Time came in small, private signals –

a turn, a kick, a sudden stillness

that no one else could hear.

The world kept asking

whether she was ready,

as though readiness

ever arrives before love does.

Then one ordinary morning,

everything narrowed

to the size of breath in a room.

It fits inside her arms –

this miracle that once lived only as waiting.

After that, days began changing shape.

Shoes left by doorways that never stay

empty.

Rooms rearranged by growth she did not

vote for.

Hands that once held her finger

now testing the distance of departure.

Still, something returns –

not always in bodies,

sometimes only in echoes:

a word spoken the same way she once

spoke it,

a laugh that forgets to be careful.

Perhaps that is motherhood –

not holding everything,

but becoming the place

where things first learn they are safe

and the place they return to

without always knowing why.

Chidimma Ewelukwa is a Nigerian writer whose work explores memory, belonging, identity, and the quiet tensions of everyday life. She has been published in Writer Monk Literary Magazine.