The Wanderer’s Eternal Vigil

Ten thousand years it walked this barren plain,
Its heart a vault of unremembered pain,
Seeking a face it could not quite recall,
A voice that once could breach death’s ashen wall.
The desert’s tongue, a serpent dry and cold,
Had licked away the stories it once told.

One eve, when stars like shattered glass were strewn,
A caravan of shades crossed the dune’s moon—
Pale travelers cloaked in twilight’s tattered grays,
Who sang of realms beyond the sun’s last rays.
Among them stepped a maid with eyes of frost,
Her gaze a key to locks long thought embossed.

“What phantom dares to haunt this lifeless stage?”
She asked, her words a tempest bound in sage.
The wanderer knelt, its voice a rusted hinge:
“I seek the one who wore this silver ring.
A vow was sworn beneath a cedar’s bough…
I feel it still, though know not when or how.”

The maiden laughed—a sound like breaking chains—
“Poor, shattered thing! Your mind but feeds on rains
That ceased to fall when Time’s first hourglass spilled.
Look west, where seven blackened mountains build
Their thrones of basalt. There, in fire confined,
Sleeps she who carved this torment in your mind.”

Through wastes where scorpions danced with bones for lyres,
Past mesas scarred by comet-fall’s hot fires,
It pressed, that soul, toward the obsidian peaks,
While memories seeped like wounds that no dawn heals.
At last, within a crater’s ashen womb,
It found the truth—and there, met its own doom.

For in a pool of mercury still and deep,
Where ancient stars their dying whispers keep,
There gazed the wraith—and in that fatal glass,
Beheld its own face from a life long passed.
The ring’s lost mate gleamed cold upon its hand,
Revealing what the sands could not withstand.

“O cruel design!” it howled to the void,
“To make me both the lover and destroyed!
I mourned myself through aeons’ grinding wheel,
Chased my own shadow through this hell-steeled reel!”
The desert laughed, its mirth a sirocco’s blade,
As recognition’s venom struck its shade.

Now fused with truth no mortal could outrun,
The soul dissolved like mist before the sun.
Its final cry, a psalm of shattered spheres,
Etched one brief storm in the desert’s dry years.
Where once two lovers vowed ‘neath boughs now dust,
A single ring lies, tarnished by distrust.

Thus ends the tale the vultures never tell—
How love, when turned to specter, builds its hell;
How recognition’s hour, when come too late,
Leaves only winds to grieve at folly’s gate.
The dunes endure. The stars maintain their dance.
The desert keeps its everlasting trance.