Epektasis

Farewell, Berlin—
not a word waved loose in air
but the bruise of leaving,
its thumbprint pressed behind the eyes,
the doorframe still warm with a hand
after silence seals the room.

Your light makes no vow.
It drills.
Clouds flatten to iron.
Afternoons strike the hours.
Winter, pale tutor of bone,
schools the flesh in staying.

Even the cold held us back,
as though the city hissed—
wait.
Hear yourself.

I name this no holiday.
This is visitation—
not to a child,
but to the birthplace of my dead,
where my fathers first learned
the grammar of endurance,
and where I, unlicensed,
still conjugate myself.

Before borders bit,
before paper learned to wound with law,
I might have lingered
till my tongue thinned its elsewhere,
till sleep forgot another sky.

Here I lie down without quarrel.
Thought falls into order.
Streets remember themselves straight,
remember without apology.

Scotland cradles me kindly,
but here—
here my shadow fits.

On platforms, in courtyards,
in the long lung-breath of trams,
my blood lifts its head,
nodding as if summoned
by its true name.

I stood where the Wall once split the wind
and spoke of East and West—
not fact, not cleverness,
but the tidal hush of a grandfather’s silence,
a calendarless cell,
the unfinished clause of antifascism
still aching for its verb.

I wanted my friend to feel this—
not a city,
but the heat that shaped me.
We walked without speaking.
Our footsteps gentled the streets.

Language fermented the air.
Memory refused sleep.

If tomorrow the plane shoulders us skyward,
I hope he carries that—
how presence can loosen stone,
how patience holds meaning,
dark and deliberate,
until it is ready.

Leaving you always breaks something, Berlin.
Yet even in flight
you remain—
lodged in the grey hive of my mind,
beating in the pulse’s drum,
a city never merely visited,
but inherited.