I’m not told this, neither are you,
but like everything that finds purchase in absence,
the crevice where once was rock,
the hollow once a home, now only hosting bones,
of starved chicks awaiting their mother
fallen to a falcon’s desperate drop,
we make meaning of what was once here.
Teach me the price of silence, pesticides
through our noses, a cellular death synchronised
with everything we kill. The geese, flying north,
do not heed the change in temperature and the monarch,
as it dies, will not see the next spring. There is a natural order
to this lawless place, one we can artifice and destroy
and wonder why the concert of cicadas have taken
a permanent vacation, or the crying cat has finally found solace.
Emptiness is its own language, but you and I,
we have learned to speak it. It’s hard to miss
something you have never known, but I must impart what the birds
sounded like before the bombs, or how your father’s voice
filled me, from the inside out. Lonely we are in the forest, without words.
But we learn, from the grave of birds, and cracks between boulders
that water was once here, weathering.
Rukman Ragas is a Tamil writer of speculative fiction from Sri Lanka. An alum of Clarion West, their work has been published in khōréō, Apex Magazine, and The Baltimore Review among others. When not wrangling his novel into shape, he can be found consuming an unhealthy amount of historical media or playing DnD.
