The Measure Of Dust And Breath Poem by Achilles Mauko

We arrive as dust learning movement,
and leave as breath learning silence.

Between these two mysteries
we construct meaning—
fragile, persistent, human.

What we build is never permanent.
Even love is revised by time.
Even grief learns to soften its grammar.

Yet something resists erasure:
the way we held others
when it cost us something,
the way we stood still
when it would have been easier to disappear.

Perhaps that is all we are measured by—
not what we kept,
but what we did not abandon.