The Walk Home
Nine o’clock in Switzerland
means the world has gone still.
Windows hum with warm light,
and the old streets forget their names.
My eleven-year-old called, said she’d come home.
Then called again:
Can you pick me up?
Four hundred meters of cold night.
But something said
she should walk.
Growing up begins in small distances.
Later a message came —
Did your daughter make it safe?
From a Ukrainian mother
who left a country
where the dark does not forgive.
Here, the dark is harmless.
There, it keeps score.
Between them,
a child walks home.