By Faith Nyokabi Njunge
19 | Nairobi, Kenya
Second-place young adult contest winner, Climate and Environment category
With lines from “The Great Climate Migration” by Abrahm Lustgarten and Meridith Kohut, a Pulitzer Center-supported story
The maps were blue first.
Then orange.
Then red.
As if the earth itself
Had developed a fever
No government could medicate.
The article said
“entire communities may become uninhabitable,”
Which is a careful way
Of saying
Someone’s grandmother
Will one day lock her door
Without knowing
She has done it
For the last time.
In school,
They taught us migration
With arrows in textbooks—
Clean little diagrams
Crossing clean little borders.
No one mentioned
The sound a father makes
While carrying photographs
Through floodwater.
No one mentioned
How children learn
To confuse evacuation
With routine.
The heat arrived slowly.
Like debt.
Like grief.
Like a rumor no one believes
Until the roofs begin sweating.
In another country,
A politician called it adaptation.
But adaptation is a strange word.
Cockroaches adapt.
People mourn.
And still,
The sea kept entering homes
Like it had memorized the addresses.
The story spoke of movement,
But movement suggests choice.
This was not movement.
This was the body
Discovering that even land
Can stop loving you back.
Tonight,
Somewhere,
A girl folds her birth certificate
Into the pocket of her dress.
Outside,
The water continues rising
Without anger.
Without mercy.
As natural disasters often do.
Faith Nyokabi Njunge is a 19-year-old creative writer, a lover of poetry, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work explores themes of justice, identity, community, and the relationship between people and the environment. Through poetry, she seeks to tell stories that encourage reflection, empathy, and action on issues shaping the world today.
Read more winning entries from the 2026 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.