Held Inside the Name

Someone has sketched a body out of light
and pulled it tight into itself—
knees to chest, chin locked down,
as if the ribs were trying to keep one spark.

The dark around it is not empty.
It hisses. It threads. It keeps on writing
the same bright word through violet drift,
through green flare, through white electric filaments
that loop and fray like live wire in rain.
Nothing here stays still.
Even the black feels worked on,
scratched open by that steady return.

The figure is all outline, nerve, and cramp,
no flesh to thicken the defence,
no shelter in the usual tricks—
not grin, not posture, not talk—
only a fine-lit frame
curled at the centre of the pressure.

Fear, perhaps.
Or the hush before a mouth can manage prayer.
Or that raw minute after damage,
when a person feels their size exactly—
small as a pulse under ash,
small as the truest thing left.

All around, the Name keeps coming—
not as thunder,
not as sentence,
but as closeness over and over
until the dark turns sheer in places,
until hurt throws off a faint rim of light,
until the body, still folded around itself,
is doing more than hiding.

Perhaps mercy is this:
not rescue, not answer,
but to be seen clear through
and still remain.

So the figure stays there,
held in that bright unrest,
while every white syllable circles inward,
making the night no less night
and yet leaving, inside it,
a room where the shaken thing can live.