The Artist’s Sands of Memory

Here walks a soul, with brush and tattered scroll,
A painter scorned, whose heart hath paid the toll,
His name erased by winds of cold disdain,
Yet in his breast, old visions still remain.

“O childhood’s ghost,” he murmurs to the dunes,
“Why dost thou haunt these lifeless, lunar runes?
I once beheld the world through colors bright—
A hearth’s warm gold, my mother’s hair alight,

Her laughter spun from April’s tender rain,
Now silenced by the years’ unending train.
The walls of home, where once my dreams took flight,
Are ashes lost to time’s unfeeling night.”

The desert sighs, a symphony of pain,
As memories surge, a bittersweet campaign:
A lilac dusk, a kite in frantic dance,
His father’s hands, calloused yet full of grace,

That carved a toy horse from storm-felled pine—
Now splinters ‘neath fate’s wheel, no longer mine.
He stumbles, clutching dust that flees his grip,
Like joy that slips from every mortal’s lip.

Before him looms a mesa, bleached and bare,
Its face upturned as if in final prayer.
“Here shall I build my masterpiece,” he cries,
“With pigments forged from twilight’s dying sighs,

This cliff my canvas, vast as sorrow’s sea,
To trap the beauty Time would steal from me!”
Through fevered nights, he labors ‘neath the spheres,
While phantoms of his youth dissolve in tears.

He paints the orchard where his heart first broke—
A stolen kiss ‘neath some forgotten oak,
The friend who shared his bread, his tales, his trust,
Now turned to shadow, swallowed by the dust.

Each stroke a requiem, each hue a wound,
The mural grows, a garden of the doomed:
Here blooms the rose his mother loved in vain,
There drips the ink of storms that brought no rain,

A boy’s lost face, half-hidden in the glaze,
A crumbling swing set in a cobalt haze.
The artist raves, “Behold! My soul laid bare—
The truth no mortal ever dared to share!”

But lo! The desert, jealous of this shrine,
Unleashes winds to tear each grieving line.
The pigments fade like footprints in a storm,
The cliff’s proud face left naked, gaunt, and warm.

He claws the rock, his nails like petals torn,
“Why must all beauty die the day it’s born?”
No answer comes but sunlight’s cruel decree—
The dunes resume their cold geometry.

Now madness grips him, sweet and sharp as wine,
He sees her there—his sister, age of nine—
Her skipping rope still gleaming in his mind,
Her voice, “Come play!” now echoes through the blind.

He chases through the labyrinth of days,
Where every mirage mocks with childhood’s rays,
Till in a valley white with bones of beasts,
He finds the well that holds his final feast.

“Drink deep,” croons Memory, “of what once flowed—
The nectar of the years that Life has owed.”
He drinks the void where love and loss combine,
And feels the desert’s breath become his spine.

The stars descend like tears on silver thread,
To shroud the form now motionless, half-dead.
His brush, still clenched, etches one final trace—
A child’s hand fading into empty space.

At dawn, the winds resume their tireless chant,
Burying the tale that none shall ever want.
No mourners come, no laurels mark this end,
Just scorpions that through the sands descend.

Yet sometimes, wanderers claim they see at night,
A boy who paints the dunes with phantom light,
While from the cliffs, where ancient echoes weep,
A lullaby drifts—soft, profound, and deep.