Shadow of a foreign light

The crossing did not undo me. I thought salt could open what blood and tears had painfully sealed. I left the men holding their fathers, their mouths shut like the houses where I grew up. They kissed me in the dark and called me by a quieter name. Here, the rain speaks softly. The green is older than my country. The stones do not ask what I am. But I brought my shadow folded in with the shirts, my mother's silence, and the crowded corners where I learned to be quiet. I came here, tired of men. I did not know I had been doing the holding too, that my own hand had grown into the shape of the closed door. A man on the cliff looks at me without looking away. His silence is not the silence I came from. He says nothing, and I understand that nothing can be a kind of yes. The shadow is still here. Smaller now. Or the light is wider. Or I am no longer running.