The Last Whisper of Arid Skies

An old man walks, his footprints scrawled in dust,
each step a trembling elegy to years
that slipped like sand through fingers’ futile trust.
His cloak, a tattered flag of hopes and fears,
flaps faintly—threadbare herald of the lost—
as night’s first star ignites, a silver gloss.

He pauses, squints at that celestial spark,
its gleam a needle stitching sky to soul.
“Art thou the same,” he rasps to the dark,
“that lit her brow when time was not so old?
When dunes were but a canvas for our tread,
and every grain a verse our laughter said?”

The star burns mute, its argent gaze unkind,
yet in its light, the past unfurls, unbidden:
a tent of thread, a loom of dreams entwined,
her hands, two doves, mid-flight by twilight smitten.
She wove their tales in tapestries of thread—
gold storms, blue mirages, love’s crimson thread—

“Recall,” he pleads, “the night we named this waste
*The Garden*? Your laughter’s silver chime
made oases bloom in every barren space.
We drank from wells unsunk by mortal time,
and in your eyes, I glimpsed eternity—
a dawn no horizon could hope to keep.”

But now her voice is ash upon the breeze,
her face a blur etched deep in sandstone’s vein.
The loom lies splintered ‘neath relentless seas
of dust, its song devoured by wind’s refrain.
The star blinks once—a tear in heaven’s vault—
as memories rise, a haunting exalt.

***

They met where dunes embraced the bleeding sun,
two wanderers clad in youth’s defiant grace.
Her hair, a storm of ink; her hands, undone
by calluses that mapped life’s harsh embrace.
“What binds you here?” she’d asked, her voice a stream
that carved its path through canyons of his doubt.
“The same that binds the falcon to its dream—
the sky’s vast lie, the earth’s unyielding mouth.”

She smiled, a crescent moon in human guise,
and spun her tales of cities made of sand,
of kings who bargained with the stars for skies,
of clocks that bled their hours through glassless hands.
“We’ll build,” she vowed, “a kingdom without walls,
where time’s a river, and the desert… falls.”

For years, they danced on razors of desire,
their love a flame that scoffed at barren miles.
She painted maps on parchment of dead fire,
he sang to scorpions, coaxing them to smile.
They nursed cracked earth with monsoons of their breath,
defied the void with gardens wrought from death.

But deserts are not conquered—they permit,
then swallow in one gulp what mortals sow.
One dusk, she coughed—a rose’s fragile split—
her blood, a rubied river, bloomed in snow.
“The star…” she gasped, “when next it crowns the night,
seek me not in flesh, but in its light.”

***

Now decades hence, he stands, a gnarled tree
whose roots clutch only echoes and regret.
The star, once witness, now his sole decree,
glints cold—a diamond on oblivion’s breast.
“I kept our vow,” he weeps, “each haunted year
I shaped the void, but you… you disappeared.”

The wind replies in tongues of shifting verse,
her phantom sigh laced through the dunes’ lament.
“Old fool,” it moans, “love’s not a curse reversed
by clinging to what night has never meant.
I am the breath that stirs the scorpion’s sting,
the shadow where your lost illusions cling.”

He staggers, clawing at the star’s false glow,
his throat a desert where her name erodes.
“Then take the rest!” he cries. “The sands can show
no mercy greater than your bleak abode.
If dust is all that waits where light expires,
let me be nothing… save the ash you sire.”

The dunes inch close, a slow, carnivorous tide,
their golden jaws agape to swallow pleas.
The star, now veiled by clouds it once denied,
abandons him to night’s decrees.
He falls, a crumpled cipher in the waste,
his final breath a kiss to death’s chaste face.

***

At dawn, the desert wears a virgin guise,
no trace of man, no scar of futile wars.
Yet in the east, a star still dares to rise—
a flicker, faint, where heaven’s door once tore.
Some say it whispers, if the wind is still,
two names entwined in its eternal chill.