The Box

The box said: Tell the truth.
So, she gave it a tick.
It swallowed eight years
with one little click.

No room for the song,
or the war, or the dead;
just YES in its cell
and NO overhead.

The square supposed nothing,
just ink on a page;
but the past stirred behind it—
the court and the cage.

It echoed the judge’s voice,
which called music a crime;
then followed her westward,
without serving time.

It followed her home
in a bureaucrat’s grip,
slept under her passport,
and shadowed each trip.

She papered the bedroom,
chose blue for the wall.
A life can look settled
yet not settle at all.

A friend wrote: Let’s meet.
So, she opened the map.
The box took a pencil
and darkened each gap.

Not here, and not there—
not that airport, that flight;
not the checkpoint at noon,
nor the runway at night.

She searched for one country
whose doors opened wide,
where her friend could enter
and she need not hide.

She studied the treaties,
the borders, the skies;
which stamp meant safe passage,
which welcomes meant lies.

When fortune was with them,
they sat down at last:
two passports together,
two cups raised to the past.

A birthday went missing.
A winter passed through.
A face on her screen said,
I still remember you.

Some people hear iron
and keys at their door.
She has tea in the kitchen,
clean sheets, a safe floor.

She will not call safety
a prison or chain.
But distance has weather,
and exile has rain.

Here, laws ask the hunter
to prove she is prey.
Here, sometimes, a sentence
is sent on its way.

Still the box keeps returning,
small, patient, and square—
at work, at the border,
in each name left there.

It cannot come knocking
or cross through her door;
yet a line on a form
brings the courtroom once more.

And sometimes the box
is exactly its size:

a country made tiny,
disguised as a choice—
two squares on a page,
and no space for a voice.