It's Still Life

Liturgy for the Weaving City
(for Lyon, 1834, where silk and blood ran together)

I. The Declaration
This is not riot.
This is declaration.

Men, women, children —
children thin as breath,
tear-streaked, sharp-elbowed,
forcing through the crowd
for one lungful of air,
one moment of being counted
among the living.

They carry no weapons.
They carry themselves:

hollow cheeks,
empty hands,
that terrible refusal
to die quietly.

Not riot.
Declaration.

II. The Answer
The army answers
in iron syllables.

Orders
that strike like tools.

No pity.
No pause.

Papers.
Names.

Bread becomes treason.

Those who fall today
are written as agitators —

as if hunger were politics,
as if wanting bread
were a crime.

III. The Escape
A hand.
A wrist.

Run.

Away from the percussion,
from lead striking stone,
coins of iron
bouncing.

Do not turn.

Turning is how a bullet
learns your name.

Behind you
the city keeps working.

IV. The Looms
And still
the silk looms answer.

Clack.
Clack.
Clack.

They wove before the shouting.
They weave through the gunfire.
They will weave tomorrow
when the gutters are rinsed
and the dead are counted.

The looms do not ask
who loads the shuttle.

Thread pulls tight.

They know only
thread,
tension,
cloth by morning.

Clack.
Clack.
Clack.

Lyon’s pulse:
iron, silk,
blood in the thread.

V. The Leaving
We lived
by leaving.

That sentence will follow us
through every border,
every borrowed room,
every moment of safety
soured by memory.

Lyon continued without us.
Cities always do.

They weave.
They kill.
They count.

And make more silk.

But the clatter
lives in the bone —

lead on cobblestones
between heartbeats.

Children walk our sleep.

VI. For the Fleeing
We did not choose to flee.
We chose to live.

And living
in such a world
is revolt.

We fled.
We lived.