By Ashani Ahuja
10th grade | The Nightingale-Bamford School | New York
Finalist, Human Rights category
With lines from “‘We Left the Girls Too Long in That Place’” by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, a Pulitzer Center reporting project
They were girls once –
not statistics, not symbols, not softened for soundbites
but daughters
each name shaped like sunlight when spoken aloud,
a half-written hymn their mothers mouthed in the dark.
In the dense hush of the Sambisa forest
even the trees learned to whisper in tongues
made of obedience and survival.
Eleven-hour sermons spilled into their bones,
scripture replacing the chalk dust
they once gathered in braids and uniform hems
toward the warm hush of home.
We left the girls too long in that place.
The stars, once curious, dimmed with quiet knowing
watched as notebooks were traded for commandments
as the sky unlearned their outlines
as they shed the shape of girlhood
and their voices became echoes they no longer recognized.
The girls didn’t even know
that the world was searching for them.
They were fed a single story, recited daily until it sounded like truth
one that buried their own
under layers of ash and doctrine.
They said they were not forced,
but when hunger is your cellmate
and fear your lullaby,
what is freedom
but a story you reshape until it hurts less?
Some came back –
carrying babies on their hips and verses in their breath.
They wore hijabs like second skins,
spoke of men with kind eyes,
prayers sent upward, not for return
but for work, for forgiveness, for paradise.
One said her husband had given her permission to go
and planned to follow –
and she waited, eyes trained on the horizon
as if deliverance could come twice.
Another girl returned to her father
and brought with her a silence deeper than the forest.
“She was a Christian,” he said,
“but they turned her into a Muslim.”
He did not say her name
because it no longer belonged to the girl he had raised.
The house in Maiduguri was really a mansion,
but it had walls and watchers
and rules about when you can leave
and who you are allowed to become.
“I have completely forgotten about the kidnapping,” one said.
But can you forget fire
when its embers still glow beneath your ribs?
And the world –
the world that once held up signs and hashtags
watched them fade from our screens
watched them choose a quiet captivity
over the dissonance of return
watched them step not into homes
but into another kind of survival.
There is a difference
between rescue and release
between return and reinvention
between being found
and being allowed to be whole again.
And still, in the echo of this place
we must ask ourselves:
Did we protect them?
Or simply rewrite the rules
so we could sleep at night
believing we did?
Ashani is a rising 11th grade student at The Nightingale-Bamford School, living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. As both a poet and an activist, she is fueled by a deep love of the written word and turns to poetry as a means of engaging with the world—amplifying unheard voices, confronting injustice, and transforming real-world stories into calls for awareness and change. When not at her desk with a pen in hand, she can be found competing in golf tournaments, sipping matcha, or playing with her dog, Bogey.
Read more winning entries from the 2025 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.