I stood alone in the calligraphy of grief,
each stroke a wound, each flourish a final
breath. I waited, ink-ground from memory’s
silt, to trace the rainbows arching
over this poem's sky, to shape the light
that fractures when a world ends.
I wrote with a tongue of metaphors
upon the poem's skin, until every stone,
every shadow, every silent bird began
to hum the elegy buried in its name.
I sang the world back into being around me,
a fragile, vibrating shell of sound and ash.
So that when you come— when you dig
through the rubble of our homes, through
the collapsed alphabet of our doors,
and find our massacred bodies sleeping
without graves, without a name to stitch
to the bone, where only the remnant
whispers: dust and bloodshed, remember
to check our palms. Turn our stiffened
hands toward what light remains.
Sometimes, in the last warmth we stole
from fire, we wrote our names with
the flames of bonfire, branding identity
into the very flesh of silence & vanishing,
so even the wind would have to make us.
DoubleSpeak 