Dufflite Xetaw Poet Free verse

The Map Refuses Him

The colony rehearses its certainty—
feathers ticking like metronomes,
breath rising and vanishing on cue.
Ice remembers every footstep
and forgives none,
yet here life proceeds by agreement,
a choreography older than language,
each body a comma
in a sentence that ends in survival.
One bird pauses.
Not dramatically—
no prophecy, no cry.
He turns inland,
toward a blankness the wind has not edited.
The snow does not argue.
The horizon does not blink.
Instinct loosens its grip
like a glove dropped without noticing.
We watch because watching is all we have.
There is no word in our mouths
that fits this angle of departure.
Nature, usually so fluent,
stammers.
The camera keeps its distance,
as if reverence were a form of ignorance,
as if explanation would be a lie.
He becomes smaller, then theoretical.
Not broken, not heroic—
simply unsponsored by reason.
Some creatures follow maps.
Some discover that the map does not include them.
The ice closes its book.
The wind keeps walking.

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