What lies under the rubble

is not only bone and dust,

not only the names no one calls at dinner,

not only the cups left waiting in cupboards

for hands that will not reach for them.
It is also trust,

buried where sirens once meant you still had time,

buried beneath maps redrawn

in ink that forgets where bodies were.
Cities keep their blueprints underground,

sleepwalkers folded into broken stone.

The air turns metallic—

iron tasting its own name again.
A bent spoon, dark with ash.

A door torn from its frame, still half-swinging.

The child’s sock, red, shrunk by fire,

still holding the outline of a foot that is not there.
Far from the collapse,

hands sign without hesitation.

Words like defense, security, stability

cross polished wood like clean knives,

while impact arrives later—

or never arrives at all.
Beneath chandeliers,

water trembles in crystal before anyone drinks.

Pens uncap.

A translation arrives intact.

Outside the photograph,

another window leaves its frame.

The sirens know the way.
I cannot step outside this.

My hands are not clean.

I read the names and eat dinner anyway.
I speak the language and sit in warmth.

The pulse in my wrist keeps its rhythm.

Nothing interrupts it.
Language under the rubble tears at the throat,

letters loosening from their meanings,

sentences pulled thin between grief and silence.
Years later,

dust will still rise from the spoon.

A hinge will rust

in the shape of its opening.
Some things do not finish

when the noise ends.
Still, beneath stone and sentence,

beneath numbers that once breathed,

something will not go quiet:
the spoon that remembers a hand,

the door that learned no closing again,

the red sock, smaller than memory—

the shape a family left in the air.