It's Still Life

Liturgy for Those Who Burned Their Names to Stay Alive
(for the ones who fled too late)

I. The First Mistake of Believing
You thought the river would wash you clean.
You thought the new tongue
would taste sweeter in your mouth.

That the accent you couldn’t shed
would be mistaken for poetry,
not origin.

But fear travels without papers.
It crossed water in the same boat,
curls in the luggage of other refugees
who also believed in geography as salvation.

II. The Slow Recognition
First sign: the way the baker
stopped counting your change aloud.

Second: how the neighbour’s curtain twitched
at the exact moment you lit the stove.

You began to hear
your own footsteps as evidence,
your breath as confession
you hadn’t yet made.

France, you learned,
is also a place where foreign
rhymes with suspect,
and different means watch closer.

III. The Burning
So you fed the fire with yourselves.

Letters from your mother,
soft with years of folding.
They went first—her looping cursive
rising as smoke, her ‘I miss yous‘
becoming the same sky
that watched you flee.

Newspapers crackled like small-arms fire,
headlines too hot to hold.
Magazine pages curling like dead leaves —
confessed nothing in the end.

You burned evidence of thought.
You burned proof of hope.
Still, you felt incriminated
by the way your shadow fell on the wall.

IV. The Arithmetic of Safety
You learned to count in crowds:
exact number of bodies required
to make one person invisible.

Markets on market days.
Cathedrals at noon.
Anywhere the eye could not rest long enough
to memorise a face.

You dressed in colour of nobody.
Grey as regret, brown as soil,
nothing that called light
to your particular bones.

And in the crush of strangers
you risked a glance at each other,
only mirror left
that didn’t lie.

V. The Wisdom Hindsight Brings
Now, looking back, you see:
there is no geography of safety.

Fear is a climate, not a border.

Same storm that drove you out
crossed water ahead of you,
waiting on the far shore
with your name already written
in its rain.

You burned the paper,
but the words had already been read—
not by them, but by you.
And that was enough.

Always enough
to make you fugitives
of your own minds.

VI. The Terrible Knowing
What you know now,
what you could not know then:

Rebellion is not in letters.
Revolt is not in headlines.
Current flows in the space
between one breath and the next.

You realised home is not a place,
but permission—
revoked
without warning.

VII. The Naming
See letters that rose as smoke.
See crowds that swallowed you whole.
See grey coats and careful steps.
See fear that kept you alive.

And know terrible wisdom of hindsight,
which does not soften past,
but finally lets you name it.

You were not paranoid.
You were not foolish.
You were reading weather
of a world about to break.

And you survived.

That is not luck.
That is sight.

Bless all who have ever burned
their own names
to stay alive.