Sixty-five years since the Union Jack came down,
And the green, white, and blue rose over Freetown.
We danced in the streets, called ourselves free,
Children of Sengbe, sons of the sea.
Sixty-five years yet the table is bare,
Mothers still counting rice grain by grain.
The diamonds run deep, but the pockets run thin,
And the boy in Lumley asks where to begin.
We buried the war, but not all of its pain.
The scars are in schools with no chalk, no rain.
Light flickers in State House, but darkness in homes,
While our daughters queue at the taps with their poems.
Yet still still the drums have not died.
In market stalls, in the ache of our pride,
In fishermen pulling nets through the tide,
In the teacher who stays though the pay’s been denied.
Sierra Leone, you are not your wounds.
You are the chorus the Atlantic still croons.
You are palm wine at dusk, you are cassava and song,
You are the stubborn belief that we still belong.
Sixty-five years is a child, not an end.
Nations, like people, must break before they mend.
So we hold your name like a coal in our chest —
Burning, hurting, but refusing to rest.
For the Leone still roars, though the voice is low.
And the seed of our fathers is still forced to grow
Through cracked concrete, through flood, through flame —
Sixty-five years, and we still speak your name.
Happy 65th, Salone.
The struggle is long, but so is the dawn.
