Epektasis

Begin with the body—
bone and breath,
your feet learning borrowed shoes,
leather thinned by roads, by rows of ruin,
laces locked with winter.

Not one pair.
A piled silence of shoes.

Put on the striped cloth.
Feel how a name loosens,
how a number cinches the self.
How breath becomes shared,
shuffled, herded forward
by shouts, dogs, dust.

January scours the compound.
Ice answers bone with blade and bite.
The road keeps taking—
step by step,
soul by sole.

Count as you walk:
those who sink into snow,
those who slump into stillness,
those the tracks remember
after the cars have emptied
their living weight.

At home, break bread slowly.
Let hunger hum in your hands.
Hide a crust in cloth.
Teach the mouth mistrust.
Let comfort crack on the tongue.

Practice stillness beneath borrowed weight.
Hold the small dark of breath.
Hear boots pass—
thud, fade, return.

When the gates open,
joy arrives thin as frost—
not freedom,
but the fragile fact of breathing.

And breathing bears its own burden:
years drawn long,
nights knotted with names and faces,
the same question flowering,
feral and returning,
in the ribs—

why them
and not me?

-

Redraft of a poem originally written to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2019.