Glass Weather Poem by Henrietta Ezegbe

Rooms built of transparent weather.
You enter
and the ceiling pretends to be sky.
The floor hums with old agreements.
Portraits blink when you pass.

You learn quickly:
gravity is not neutral here.
Credit evaporates mid-sentence.
Warnings are called storms.
Truth is "tone."

Some arrive armored in inheritance.
You arrive in stillness.
Not the loud kind.
Not the performance of thunder.
But the kind that rearranges furniture
without touching it.

They call that stillness
many things.
Killjoy. Ambitious. Sharp. Too much. Not enough.

You let the names pass through you
like light through glass,
bending, not breaking.

In certain seasons
the cliff appears as invitation.
A chair placed carefully
at the edge of a narrative
already tilting downward.
You sit anyway.
You test the grain of the wood.
You measure the wind.

You understand the calculus:
when to correct the record.
When to let the echo hang.
When to allow a small theft
so the vault remains intact.

There are those who survived
by sanding themselves down,
mirror-polished,
reflecting only what was permitted.

There are those who built ladders
and then pulled them up
to prove they belonged.

You study them
without judgment.
Survival writes in invisible ink.

In the corridors,
microclimates brush your shoulder,
almost touch, almost slight,
almost compliment.
You do not flinch.

Assimilation is a language
an accent is intentional.

Authenticity is not confession.
It is ownership.
Not spectacle.
Not permission.

You possess your possession,
your cadence,
your pause,
your refusal to rush
toward approval.
You inhabit what is yours
without announcement.

Authority, for you,
is not volume.
It is temperature control.
You lower the room
by degrees.

You know allyship
is a verb with conditions.
Some will link arms
only in well-lit photographs.
Some will whisper solidarity
behind reinforced doors.

You keep a private ledger:
who stands when it costs,
who disappears when it counts.

Self-preservation is not retreat.
It is rationing fire.

You pick your battles
like a jeweler selecting stones,
clarity over spectacle,
weight over shine.

Intersection is not a crossing.
It is a prism.
Light enters whole.
It leaves refracted,
multiplied,
undeniable.

And still,
you remain calm weather.

Glass does not announce
when it stops being barrier
and starts being mirror.

One day
the ceiling will realize
it has been sky
all along.