Poem of the End

They are walking to say goodbye, and they both know it. Poem of the End moves through the streets of Prague at the pace of two people prolonging the last hour of a love, past lit windows and over a bridge above the Vltava, toward the place where parting stops being a word and becomes a thing the body does. Tsvetaeva wrote it at thirty-one, exiled from a Russia that no longer existed, so the breakup carries a second loss folded inside it: the end of a person and the end of a home, mourned in one breath. Read it aloud and you hear love coming apart in the grammar itself, lines snapped to a gasp, exclamations splitting sentences down the middle, the whole poem stumbling forward like someone who cannot stop walking toward something irreversible. By the last crossing, the world that needed two people to hold it up simply lets go.