Poetry · 14 February 2026
From One, a Multitude
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The attempt to erase one life gives rise to a multitude that cannot be contained by numbers.
Title: Poem
‘From One, a Multitude’
One
fell in silence.
No cry,
no name
to be engraved on a stone.
Only a number
drawn with a black line
upon a wall.
They imagined
it was all over,
that ‘one’ had been subtracted
and the multitude had grown quiet.
But the wall
knew arithmetic.
From the crack in that very line
shadows grew;
two columns,
three columns,
and then
a crowd that could no longer
fit inside a number.
Within the borders of this very land
each fall
became a step
for another to rise.
One fell,
but the earth
multiplied them.
And now,
along that same crossed-out ‘one’,
we stand;
nameless,
faceless,
but countless.