(In our home they say: “You can’t hide your nakedness from the bath bucket.”)

My bath bucket knows too much.
It has witnessed every version of me—
the young body, the unsure body,
the body that believed in future,
and the one renegotiating its terms.
When I complain,
the bucket laughs in plastic:
Oh, now you care about dignity?
After all the years you stood before me
like a half-finished warning sign?
It reminds me that water reveals the truth—
the sagging, the scars,
the courage it takes to wash ourselves
even when the body feels borrowed.
I tell the bucket not everything
needs commentary.
It tells me:
My friend, you can hide from the world,
but not from the one you bathe with.

————

Marvin Garbeh Davis, Sr., is a Liberian writer whose work explores memory, endurance, faith, and the quiet dignity of ordinary lives. His fiction and poetry draw deeply from Liberia’s river towns, rubber plantations, and the landscapes of post-war resilience. His works seek to preserve overlooked histories and illuminate the essence of the human spirit in the face of hardship. He lives with his wife, Angea, in Monrovia, where he writes to honor the stories that shaped him and the ones still unfolding around him.