For Echoes of war

They came with boots louder than our drums,

thinking silence could be stitched into our tongues.

But our voices are wild rivers,

and even when caged, water finds a crack.

The script inked in defiance still breathes.

We are not children scared of shadows—

we are the shadow that grows teeth.

They cuffed the playwright, not the pen,

but a pen is never alone—it births storms.

We watched them guard rehearsal rooms like gold vaults,

forgetting memory lives in the marrow.

The lines we learned in whispers still bloom in our mouths.

You cannot handcuff a heartbeat.

You cannot police the pulse of truth.

Our stage is not theirs to gate.

Each blocked entrance is a call to another door.

What they ban becomes sacred.

Every denied rehearsal is a revolution rehearsed in soul.

They fear what the girls have become—mirrors.

We reflect the rot, the rage, the reckoning.

We are what they want erased.

Echoes of war do not fade, they ferment.

Every silence they force feeds the fire.

This is not a play—it is prophecy dressed in uniform.

Let them bring tear gas to curtain calls,

we will breathe it and speak louder.

Our script is louder than sirens.

Our truth has learned to roar.

Hearts do not wait for court orders to beat.

Even barred from the hall, we perform—

on air, on skin, on memory’s restless stage.

We will echo the echoes till the echoes echo back.

You cannot crush a flower with a gavel.

Let them chain the body,

the idea has already walked free.

We are the girls who dream in thunder.

Even in fear, we walk with fire in our spines.

Each denied spotlight lights a thousand more.

Let them throw stones—we will build stories.

Let them lock doors—we will unhinge the sky.

They fear the script because it breathes

everything they hoped would stay buried.

A play is a blade when truth holds the hilt.

They thought it was theatre—

but it was testimony, stitched in stage-light.

They thought they halted the act—

but we had already become the act.

We echo the war not to glorify it,

but to remind them: we survived it.

And even if they burn the script to ash,

we will speak its smoke into the wind.

Let it reach every child whose voice they fear.

We are not just Butere, we are the beginning.

The girls stand taller than riot gear.

The play goes on in every listening heart.

Try stopping that curtain call.

© Bunguswa ™