By Egor
10th grade | Secondary School No. 145 | Krasnoyarsk, Russia
First place K–11 contest winner, Peace and Conflict category
With lines from "In Congo, Embroidery Artist Stitches an Archive of War" by Sophie Neiman and Hugh Kinsella Cunningham, a Pulitzer Center-supported story
She used to sew flowers and birds.
The nuns had given her that —
the delicate discipline of beauty,
petals in rows, wings mid-flight,
thread pulled through linen
like a small prayer answered.
Then the war came.
Not once — again, again,
as wars do in eastern Congo,
arriving and arriving
in different uniforms,
wearing the same face.
"In 1997, her husband was killed
while walking to their farm."
After that, she says,
she didn’t want to sew flowers anymore.
*
So she chose to sew the truth instead.
Men with their hands bound.
Backs to the lash.
A colonial official carried high
while those beneath him bent.
She stitched what she had witnessed.
She would not let it blur.
It can take her five full days
to stitch a human face.
Five days.
Think of that: the slow hours
pressing a needle through burlap,
choosing each thread color
for a face the world has already forgotten.
She has not forgotten.
That is the whole point.
*
I have read about war
in the language of numbers —
1.7 million displaced,
decades of conflict,
rebel groups and mineral rights
stacked like ledger entries.
The numbers are accurate
and tell me almost nothing.
But here: an eighty-year-old woman
in Goma, needle in her wrinkled fingers,
tongue between her lips in concentration,
pulling green thread in and out —
a soldier's uniform emerging
stitch by slow stitch
from a square of burlap.
That I understand.
That reaches me.
*
Peace is not the absence of war.
Peace is Lucie Kamuswekera
refusing to let her grandchildren
inherit only silence.
She teaches them the craft.
She teaches them the why.
She passes the needle like a torch
across the dark between generations.
She creates many of her tapestries from memory
refusing to ignore the past
in hope of a better future.
Not despite memory — through it.
Not against the past — by knowing it.
*
A soldier and a flower
cost the same number of stitches.
Both require a steady hand.
Both ask you to look
at the thing you are making
and decide: is this true?
Have I seen this clearly?
Will this outlast me?
She began with beauty.
War gave her something harder to carry.
She carried it anyway —
into fabric,
into color,
into the hands of her grandchildren
who are already learning
what not to forget.
From Egor: It is truly an honor to receive this recognition. I am 17 years old and in 10th grade. I wrote "What She Would Not Forget," inspired by the story of an embroidery artist in Congo who stitches scenes from war as a way of preserving memory. I wanted to explore how peace is not simply the absence of conflict, but the act of remembering and passing that memory on.
Read more winning entries from the 2026 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.