The Oracle of Shifting Sands
A traveler treads the wasting dunes that drink the sun’s last spite.
His cloak, a threadbare tapestry of storms he could not outrun,
Flaps like a raven’s broken wing against the sirocco’s tongue.
Ten thousand days have carved their creed upon his sun-cracked face,
Yet still he seeks the nameless truth that haunts this barren place—
A whisper from the bedrock’s heart, a riddle wrapped in flame,
The secret gnawing at his bones no mortal tongue can name.
The desert breathes. The dunes exhale a labyrinthine sigh,
Rearranging all their teeth to bite the cobalt sky.
No cairn remains where vultures scribe their circular lament—
The map he clutches in his fist bleeds ink like punishment.
At twilight’s ashen precipice, when shadows start to weep,
He spies a figure etched in smoke where dunes and darkness meet.
No footprint mars the rippled sand where this pale specter stands,
A hooded shape with eyes like voids that drink the desert’s hands.
“What pilgrim seeks the scorpion’s nest where truth and venom mate?”
The voice unfolds like burial cloths from some primeval date.
“I seek the well that quenches not,” the traveler’s rasp replies,
“Where answers rot like mummied fruit beneath unblinking skies.”
The stranger’s laugh unspools a chill that knots the traveler’s breath—
A sound of tombs disturbed by roots that crack the bones of death.
“The road you walk is lined with teeth that hunger for your doubt.
Turn back before the moon forgets what flesh your name was wrought.”
But resolve, that stubborn lodestone forged in sorrow’s forge,
Binds him tighter to the path where all sure things diverge.
“Show me the heart beneath the sand, the wound that will not scar,
Or let the wind erase my tracks where no epitaphs are.”
No moonrise crowns the hour’s brow. No comet streaks its plea.
The stranger parts his ashen cloak. “Then come, and cease to be.”
They walk through nights that coil like serpents shedding skins of time,
Past arches carved by phantom rains in limestone’s frozen rhyme.
The traveler tastes the ages’ dust on every labored breath,
While shadows dance a tarantella with the dance of death.
At last they halt where sandstone weeps its ochre-colored tears,
Before a temple sunk in sand up to its blindfolded seers.
“Behold the Oracle’s domain,” the guide’s cold murmur flows,
“Where every question births a thorn, and every answer grows.”
The air hangs thick with myrrh’s last gasp and cinnamon’s decay,
As hieroglyphs of suffering melt into the clay.
Through corridors where echoes starve, they reach the inner shrine—
A mirror pool of quicksilver beneath a dome’s decline.
“Gaze deep,” the specter hisses, “where no lies may be concealed.
The truth you crave will strip your soul like harvest fields revealed.”
The traveler kneels, his parched reflection warping in the sheen,
And sees—
Oh cruel inversion!—not the desert’s yawning maw,
But all the love he’d bartered off to feed ambition’s law.
The wife who faded like a tune hummed by a dying maid,
The child’s unmarked grave now lost where salt and sands parade.
The silver ripples whisper scenes in Time’s unsparing script—
Each kind word left unspoken, every mercy left unscript.
His life’s mosaic laid bare: a million shards of want,
The hollowness of victories that built his soul’s redoubt.
“This is the truth,” the specter croons, “no sage nor scroll contains—
That every step toward light casts shadows where darkness reigns.
You sought the core of existence? Behold its perfect sum:
We are the questions that consume the hands that feed them crumbs.”
The traveler claws his breastplate where no heartbeat dares respond,
As understanding’s vipers coil ‘round roots too deep to plumb.
“Mercy!” he cries to vacant air, “Let ignorance be my balm!”
But truth, once glimpsed, cannot be caged—it beats like wings of psalms.
His fingers crumble into ash, his eyes spill midnight’s ore,
As wisdom’s cancer eats the cells that myths and tales restore.
The temple groans, its columns bow to Time’s unyielding weight,
Entombing both the seeker and his curse to contemplate.
Now when the simoom wails its dirge through canyons bleached of hope,
A new mirage takes shape—a man who cannot see the rope
Of answers fraying in his grip as dunes shift their reply:
The truth was never in the sand, but in the search’s cry.
And far beneath the swallowing waves of the desert’s restless tide,
Two skeletons embrace—the fool who asked, and guide who lied—
Their hollow sockets watching as the stars, indifferent, burn,
For in the end, all seekers learn what stones already know:
That Truth is but the mirror held to all we’ve left behind,
A labyrinth without center that the blind lead out the blind.
The desert smiles her crescent smile, and drinks another’s tears—
Another soul who thought to wrestle ghosts of bygone years.
So ends the tale in dust’s embrace, where no epiphanies bloom,
Just wind-carved lies on shifting slopes, and silence as the tomb.
