The Whispering Wastes: A Lament of Shadows
A lone soul treads the dunes, a wraith in endless night.
No moon doth carve its silver path through voids above,
No breath of wind disturbs the sands—this desert’s love
Is silence, vast and cruel, a shroud of whispered pain,
Where time itself lies choked by chains of scorching chain.
The pilgrim’s feet, though fleshless now, still bleed the past,
Each step a dirge for hopes too bright, too frail to last.
Ten thousand years have gnawed the cliffs of memory’s keep,
Yet still one truth remains—a wound too raw to sleep.
Some secret stirs beneath the dust, a throb unseen,
A serpent coiled where once a heart’s red springs had been.
The wanderer halts, its hollow gaze cast low,
As shifting grains conspire to murmur what they know:
*“Behold the tomb of choices made in fevered haste,
Where every footprint drowns in tides of ancient waste.”*
A shadow splits the haze—a spire, stark and lean,
Its crown devoured by the thirst of sands between.
A monument to kings whose names the dust revoked,
Whose empires now are but the jests the west wind joked.
Within its fractured heart, a spectral glow takes form,
A pulse of blue that beckons through the lethal storm.
The soul obeys, drawn near to truths long sealed away,
Where rot and revelation dance in grim ballet.
*“Approach,”* the ruins sigh, *“and claim thy bitter due,
For none may flee the reckoning that shapes the true.
What hand hath carved thy path? What folly bade thee stray?
Thy chains were forged not by the stars, but by the clay
That once did beat as flesh, now phantom-frail and worn—
Thy prison is no desert, but the soul thou’st torn.”*
The air grows thick with phantoms—scenes of yester’s woe,
A tapestry of moments damned to endless flow.
There blooms a garden, lush with vows too sweet to keep,
Where laughter dripped like honey, pure, untouched by grief.
A face appears—ah, gaze not on that visage dear!
Eyes brimming with a trust the heavens rent sheer.
*“I waited,”* speaks the shade, *“where twilight’s fingers fade,
But thou didst choose the serpent’s kiss, the blight it made.
The cure lay not in distant sands, but in thy palm,
Yet pride’s dark nectar sang thee to thy ruinous calm.”*
The soul, once mute, finds voice—a rasp of broken tides:
*“I sought to spare thee from the storm my heart did hide.
In shadows I did cloak the canker in my breast,
Lest love behold the festering and break its nest.
O, had I spoken ere the silence grew too vast!
But now the hourglass hath shed its final cast.
This waste is my own making, boundless, cursed, unkind—
The mirror of the desolation in my mind.”*
The spire shudders, crumbling to a mournful sigh,
As truths, like scorpions, beneath the stones do lie.
The pilgrim’s form begins to fray, a wisp undone,
Its essence scattered where no dawn shall kiss the sun.
The desert drinks the last of tears it deigned to shed,
And in the stillness, whispers crown the newly dead:
*“Behold the price of secrets nursed in pride’s cold keep—
The soul that feared to bleed, now doomed to weep, to weep…”*
Far off, the horizon bleeds a fleeting gold,
A lie of dawn that taunts the damned with visions bold.
The sands resume their reign, eternal, undefiled,
A testament to hearts that chose the barren wild.
No marker graces where the soul did meet its frost,
For deserts, like regret, remember all they’ve lost.
And somewhere, in the void, a love still waits, unknowing,
While shadows chant the anthem of the endless sowing…
