The Ashen Compass
A child of dust and fractured bones treads realms where sirens sing.
No name he bears but echoes—whispers of a mother’s breath
Extinguished mid-syllable, now swallowed by the teeth
Of dunes that shift like liquid time. His feet, raw maps of scars,
Carve questions in the wasteland’s flesh beneath indifferent stars.
III
The locket cold against his breast, its chain a rusted noose,
Holds faces blurred by decades’ frost, yet still their eyes seduce
Him onward. Silver clasp once kissed by lips now turned to silt,
It points (he swears) to somewhere East, where phantom waters spilt
By mercy’s hand might pool. He counts his ribs to mark the days,
While vultures stitch their blackened threads through heat’s relentless haze.
III
Night falls—a thief of contours—yet the path persists, half-seen:
A glyph no mortal hand inscribed, but centuries between
The scorpion’s dance and pilgrim’s boot. The wind, that ancient scribe,
Unscrolls papyrus made of sand, recounts each swallowed tribe
In vowels of desiccated breath. He drinks the air’s thin lies,
While somewhere, stones erect themselves to block the eastern skies.
IV
Three suns since hunger gnawed the leash. His tongue, a shriveled root,
Still shapes the names he scavenged from the caravans’ mute
And bleached debris. “They called you *hope*,” the jackal’s grin implies,
Its paws adept at turning bones to psalms. The child’s eyes
Refuse the feast. He clutches tight the locket’s faded gleam—
A north star forged from memory in reason’s fractured scheme.
V
Dawn bleeds. The dunes exhale a city wrought of smoke and glass,
Its spires bending like mirage yet rooted as his past.
Through gates where no watchmen remain, he steps on cobbles warm
With ghosts of market chatter. Here, the air congeals to form
A voice: “What seeks the moth,” it hums, “within the flame’s embrace?”
The walls, alive with frescoes, twist to chart his father’s face.
VI
Beneath the basilica’s cracked dome, where light stabs like a vow,
A mirror waits. Not glass, but mercury—its quivering brow
Reveals no boy, but shapes that writhe: a lineage of thirst,
Each generation’s footprints erased as if accursed.
The locket screams. He pries it loose, lets lies clink on the stones,
Yet in that liquid void, he sees—and knows—the truth’s sharp bones.
VII
The desert, ever patient, breathes. Its sands, a rising tide,
Claim locket, shrine, and pilgrim with impartial hands. Inside
The child’s last gasp, a laughter blooms—not cruel, but vast and old.
The vultures dip their wings in salute as stories fold
Back into hungry silence. Somewhere East, a well runs dry,
Its waters drunk by shadows cast beneath a bloodless sky.
VIII
No ballads etch his transit where the wind erases tracks,
But when the moon hangs skeletal and night reveals its cracks,
Look close: the dunes still bear the weight where small knees met their doom,
And in the locket’s broken heart, two faces still exhume
The question none dare utter—why the compass points to graves,
And why the truth, when found, wears only dust’s collaborative shroud.
