The Painter’s Last Mirage
A lone soul treads the wastes where no soft breezes blow,
His palette cracked and parched, his brushes clenched in hand,
The painter seeks the muse within this barren land.
The dunes, like ancient sentinels, in silence rise,
Their golden crests ablaze beneath the searing skies,
A canvas vast and vacant stretched before his eyes,
Where shadows weave their tales in whispers disguised as sighs.
“O realm of endless wonder, grant my heart’s desire—
A vision pure as starlight, fierce as solar fire!”
He cries unto the void, his voice a hollow strain,
The wind, a spectral minstrel, answers with disdain.
Three moons ascend the heavens, casting spectral light,
Their silver tears ignite the sands, once sullen, bright,
And lo! A figure shimmers where the horizons blend,
A maiden formed of mirage, both foe and fleeting friend.
Her gown, a storm of opal, swirls with every stride,
Her eyes, twin voids of midnight, hold the stars inside,
“Come, mortal,” speaks the phantom, voice like dunes that slide,
“Where forgotten dreams are buried, true art shall abide.”
Through canyons carved by eons’ slow and patient breath,
He follows her faint footprints, dancing close to death,
The water-skins grow lighter, hope’s cruel counterweight,
Each step etches his story on the stones of fate.
At last, they reach a spire where time itself seems chained,
Its obsidian face with constellations stained,
“Here paint the soul of silence,” bids the desert’s bride,
“And immortality shall flow like time’s own tide.”
With trembling hands, he mixes hues of dusk and dread,
The blood from cracked lips stains his brush a fevered red,
He paints the ache of solitude, the weight of years,
The scream of dying comets, the ice of unshed tears.
The maiden watches, smiling, as his genius pours,
A masterpiece emerging from the canyon’s pores,
But as the final stroke descends, the sands arise—
The phantom’s form unravels, laughter stings his eyes.
“Fool! No hand can capture what the void claims as own,
Your soul was but the pigment, this rock the final stone.”
The spire drinks his painting, every line erased,
The desert sighs contented—beauty’s trace effaced.
His brushes snap like promises, his pigments flee,
Now dust among the dust of all that ceased to be,
The moons, now cold and distant, veil their pallid gaze,
As winds rewrite the dunes in their eternal maze.
He stumbles through the valleys where no echoes wake,
A shadow painting shadows in the ashen lake,
The colors all have faded from his vacant stare,
The artist and his anguish swallowed by the air.
Where once three moons bore witness to ambition’s flame,
Now shifts the sand unmarked by any mortal name,
The desert keeps no record of the dreams it steals,
Its perfect, pitiless beauty evermore conceals.
Thus ends the painter’s odyssey beneath cruel skies,
Where art becomes the moth drawn to oblivion’s eyes,
The greatest works, it’s said, are those we leave behind—
But desert sands decree all truths must be resigned.
