Air shifts against skin—
lighter somehow,
finer,
catching along the arms.

Not wind.
Not draft.

No longer only space
to pass through.

I pushed the frame wide.
Lifted the latch.
Something in me gave, too.

Fabric stirs
before you reach the doorway.

My palm finds warmth
where you stood.

Light settles—
heavy, soft—
on the chair back.

Leans there.
Still.
Waiting.

Walls hold something—
not echo,
not memory,
low through bone.

Curtains draw
deeper breath.

Air settles heavy
behind you.

I touch the rim
of the cup.
Heat rises there—
thin,
unfolding.

I run my hand
along the grain.
A mark already there,
warm,
pressed deep.

I breathe in fully:
something moves
inside the room,
inside me.

Under skin—
everything
slowly
rearranges.

Weight settles
differently.

Heart lifts,
not beating faster,
but wider.

Everything
more open.

The threshold
crosses.

Everything shifts
under skin.


© 2026 L. O. Campbell
All rights reserved.

✧

Eros the Philosopher

Your hand
rests on my wrist—
pale skin,
soft unchanged,
yet I feel the contact
before the movement completes,
as though the moment
has prepared itself
ahead of time—
waiting,
as if it knows
it will not come again.

I notice
the metal of your rings
no longer sits tight.
There is space now
between the gold
and the bone—
a slight give
that was not there before,
a gap nothing is able to fill.

And here is the thing I will learn to name too late:
When I almost speak, my throat closes of its own accord.
When I almost reach, my arm grows heavy as stone.
The choice not to ask, not to press, not to break the quiet—
it is not a decision I make with my mind alone.
It settles in the space between my ribs,
a physical chill that holds me still,
as if my own body has agreed to let you go
before I even understand what is being agreed to.

We sit,
and the space
between our shoulders
disappears—
not by closing,
but because
nothing remains there
to hold apart—
as if the distance
has already been folded
into something final.

You lift the cup.
Your fingers gather
with their usual ease,
the motion complete,
yet held
a fraction longer
at its height—
as if you are memorising
the shape of the action,
or testing what strength
remains.

When you laugh
toward the sky,
I watch the small passage:
breath rising,
the neck following
just after—
the order preserved,
yet gently retimed,
like a song slowing
to its last few notes.

Nothing altered in form.
Everything recognisable.
Yet the rhythm
in which things arrive
begins, softly,
to slow—
and I let it.

When you speak,
your voice settles
closer to where it begins,
remaining
as though the air itself
has chosen
to hold it—
to keep it safe,
to keep it from fading
too fast.

I do not question it.
I notice instead
how often your gaze
pauses just beyond the room,
attending
to something
kept quietly within reach—
something I could have asked to see,
something I chose not to.

© 2026 L. O. Campbell
All rights reserved.

✧The Princess and the Poet continues…

The Orbital Tilt

The ribs widen before the lungs decide. A slant in the light pulls the marrow toward the door. No herald, only the skin rising into gooseflesh beneath the weave of a heavy sweater.

The air grows dense, salt-heavy, dragging against the chest. When he moves, the room draws tight around him, a low vibration gathering in the eardrums like a bell struck somewhere under water. Vision narrows to the silver arc of his jaw, the atmosphere parting and resealing in the wake of his stride.

The pulse gathers in the wrists, a steady heat against the cuffs. The spine lengthens, vertebrae stacking until the crown of the head presses the invisible ceiling of the moment. No words arrive. Instead, a hollow opens behind the breastbone, a deep ache that draws the shoulders forward.

The centre of gravity migrates. A planet tilting toward a hidden sun. The tongue lies heavy and silent. The palms dampen against the grain of the table as the body’s weight shifts from heel to the forward edge of the feet.

There is no falling. Only the sudden recognition of a force that does not touch. A tether tightens at the solar plexus until breath is no longer a choice, only something drawn from the captivated air.

The Orbital Tilt © 2026 L. O. Campbell 
All rights reserved.

Liquid Light

On her dresser,
taller than my hand,
glass holding the afternoon.

Sunlight entered,
settled there,
turned the liquid amber—
as though warmth
had found a place
to remain.

I learned its meaning
before language did.

When she reached for it,
the room shifted.
Drawers opened.
Fabric moved.
Time gathered
toward departure.

I hovered,
not asking,
circling the edge
of where she stood.

One press.
A brief cloud
suspended between us.

It fell lightly—
her wrist,
the air,
sometimes on me.

The scent—
warm,
then brighter.
The day itself
leaned nearer.

She laughed,
bent down,
left a kiss
or fingers at my ribs
until breath broke into sound.

I believed then
that leaving
was temporary,
that sunlight
returned everything
it touched.

Outside,
the garden held its colour.
Windows stayed open.
Nothing resisted the hour.

The perfume faded slowly,
working into skin,
into clothing,
into rooms
that continued
after she was gone.

I did not understand
what was being given—
how scent learns memory,
how warmth survives
without the body
that carried it.

Now,
when light passes through glass,
it stops me.

Not grief.
Not even longing.

The sudden knowledge
that I once stood
inside a moment
already becoming
what remains.

And somewhere in the day,
without warning,
the air changes—

briefly brightened,
as if she has just passed through
on her way elsewhere,
leaving enough behind
to recognise her
without turning.

The Amphibious Tether

The salt stings the inner rim of the eyelid. Arms churn against a weightless, sapphire pull, driving deeper into the heave of the swells. There is no shore, only the rhythmic collapse of crests against the chest. Every muscle coils and releases in suspension, a constant propulsion through the turquoise cold.

Underneath the ribs, a frantic pulse thrums against the pressure of the deep. The mouth opens to a rush of brine, swallowing the thick, numbing drift. The ears fill with the roar of the current, a heavy, vibrating silence that erases the memory of solid earth. Downward, the legs kick against the darkening crush, searching for a boundary that never arrives.

A flicker moves beneath the surface, a silver darting, a shiver passing along the skin. The body arches toward the sudden scent of depth, yet the fingers claw upward, seeking the trembling membrane of air. The ribs ache with held breath. The gaze fixes on the liquid ceiling where blue tightens into an opaque, crushing velvet.
The descent continues, a slow revolving drift into the belly of the tide. The song of the water vibrates through the jawbone, a low melodic hum dissolving the marrow. There is only the reach of the limbs, the burn of brine, and the vast, unyielding circle of the wake.

Between sinking and rising, something holds.

Not anchor. Not escape.

A tether.

The blue light of the status dot pulsed, a single rhythmic pixel of artificial life. It was 10:00 p.m., and the interface confirmed his presence. He was a coordinate in the cloud, a temporary address in a machine that never slept.

I watched the screen, my face washed in the anaemic glow of the monitor. The room stayed dark, smelling of shampoo air and warmed plastic. Seeing that green light was like watching a flare from a shore I would never reach. It did not mean connection. It only meant occupancy.

The cursor blinked in the empty text box, a steady, judgemental heartbeat.

I lifted my hands.
Lowered them again.

The cooling fan rose and fell. Somewhere in the circuitry a clock ticked, though I could not hear it. The screen dimmed, then brightened. The dot faltered, returned.

I did not move.

We were two transmissions routed through the same cold wires, synced to the millisecond and separated by everything.

Loadbearing

Nothing collapses—
but the walls know their limit,
how plaster holds fracture
like stress locked in bone.
Cups stay where set,
but their bases press faint rings
into wood that remembers
what heat does to grain.
Doors learn their frames
so well they curve to the gap,
sealing it behind what we said.

What carried the weight
was never the shout—
it was the quiet that calculated
each step, the choice to leave
rooms intact and hollow,
to let the structure stand
while everything inside
corrodes.

We lived in that engineering:
spoke in syllables we measured,
stored breath in drawers
with the sharp things we hid.
Ceilings taught us
how much a body can suspend—
how long flesh can bow
before it buckles like floorboards under joists.

Even now the floors do not fail.
They bow, holding pressure.
They memorise footfall as scars,
redistribute years
into the cracks we pretend
are part of the design.

Some silences are beams.
They do not announce themselves.
They stay—
and with every passing hour,
they tighten their grip
on what they were built to bear.

Neglect is speech itself,
the loudest word unspoken.

I tally the words
you did not utter,
not as what is missing
but as proof made flesh.

Whole hours cave
into a void whose weight
bends every scale.

Negligence is not silence,
it is silence honed to edge,
a withholding so exact
it carves to bone.

Love left untended
is no love at all.
It shrinks,
loses all proportion
of its own name.

I have come back to the floor
where wood remembers weight, where my 
feet
know grain the way we once knew words—
not perfectly, not as we once did.

Two years in the cage of my own bone.
I saw earth split open in places you’ll never map,
saw joy become a thing to bury deep
like seeds in burned ground. You let go,
but your shadow stayed—long as a neck
curved toward water that won’t hold a 
reflection.

Today I am barefoot. No swan’s white dress,
no wings sewn from tulle and hope.
I am black feather, oil-slick, moving
against the pull that kept me down—
gravity no longer a joke I could afford.

My hips stutter like gunfire I still dream,
my arms reach for you, then fold inward,
a question and its answer in the same breath.
I am not whole. I am what’s left
when the lake freezes and thaws and freezes 
again.

Each step is a small war I win,
each turn a letter I’ll never send.
This body was broken open like a border 
town,
but look how it bends.
I dance for what stayed,
for the swan that learned to walk
before it could fly again.

The Language of Ashes

The fire’s gone quiet now—no more crackle, no wild rush
of flame hurling itself at the dark! Only ash, soft and thick,
settling in drifts where words once reared up alive,
their shapes keen as pilings thrust hard into the breathing air.

I thought I’d feel myself lift clean away when your letters
blackened and crumbled down to powder—but ash has its own heavy soul:
dense as river-silt, heavy as the very bone of what was solid, made fine.

It coats my hands like a second skin, won’t wash clean no matter how I scrub—
stains every breath I draw with the scent of smoulder and slow burn.
It works its way into the creases of my palms, deep into the hollows
of my throat—each tiny grain a sign of what once held fierce shape
ere it was wrought into this.

Even destruction has its own vital form, its own blueprint:
the faint, warm pulse lingering in the pile,
the ghost of a line pressed deep into the stone beneath,
the heavy weight of what was not wiped out—but changed, transfigured, made new in its ending.

.

I reach for your skin—
hands learning
the curve,
the ridge of bone
where muscle softens like clay.
You draw back a breath,
and my touch shifts,
finding its place not over you
but against—
palm to grain,
as if I am feeling the weave
beneath the gesso.

Lips place warmth
into shadow,
slow as pigment into canvas.
Your breath tilts the light,
shaping how colour settles,
which strokes hold,
which are allowed to fade.

My tongue—
the brush’s edge—
does not glide.
It catches on what you have left rough,
draws through the grain you offer,
where meaning pools like glaze
only if we let it settle.

You are not the painting.
We are
lines that waver as we move,
hues that resist before they blend,
a surface altered
by every measured press.

Hands move inward,
but you redirect them
to knotted muscle,
to the pulse that answers
only when you allow it.
What I thought I knew
about you
loosens in my hands—
and I feel the small fear
of being changed
by what I touch.

Lips find
the seam between warmth and cool,
where shadow holds.
You tilt your head,
present new skin,
paint over what I laid down
with something thick as impasto—
neither of us could make
alone.

The brush pauses
at the edge of the frame.
We lean in, then away—
unsure where it ends,
unwilling to mend
what is still becoming.

You hold,
then change by your own will.
A curve deepens.
A line tightens with breath.
The gesture refuses to settle—
holding its shape
as it shifts.

What remains
is not the image
but the ache of staying,
the risk of being seen
in the meeting of thumb to skin—
the way every stroke
scrubs clean
who I was
to ask who I am
now.



.

It is not for how she burned,
but for how briefly
she held the sky.

She fell after hell
had already rained down from above,
bound to Earth’s pull,
its deafening insistence.

Her head struck first.

I rose from my pillow, knowing
the distance was too great,
like those dreams
where you run, sweating,
and the road only lengthens.

The fall is vertical.
There is no resistance now.
The time for resistance
has passed.

Size and geometry matter.
Mass, velocity, angle.

But the tilt of her face toward mine
when I enter the room
does not.

Let us go to Jupiter.
Let us go anywhere
the laws loosen their grip on,
where hammer and feather
arrive together.

Let us go farther still,
to the deepest part of the mind,
where gravity is remembered
but briefly suspended.

Death I Implore Thee

Perch upon her shoulder, let us freely talk
Oh, Death, life is fatal, it comes to one and all.
Poison seeds rampage through sunken veins
Ravaged is her body spoons of dulled pain

Peck her bones, lay her sick from the drip
Will her God judge how tight thy grip?
For she has lived, loved, with clarity
Preen your feathers encompass her dignity.

You are her darkness, not wholly bad or good
Casting shadow where full life once stood
This bed but a prison, her body poked sore
Life hath become helpless, sunlit no more

Her eyes have seen wonder, but too oft they weep.
Grant her sanctuary, bequeath her last mortal sleep.

He comes to me.

No barrier between us.



Just space,

and his figure in it,

familiar,

slightly altered,

as if the night

has softened the edges

the day insists on.



His hair is thick.

It brushes my wrist

when he turns,

and the contact wakes

something slow

in the body.



We do not speak.

The dream does not need words.



His hand rests

at the centre of my chest,

not pressing,

just there,

a quiet weight

as if listening

for what has been held

too long.



My breath changes.

He notices.



That is enough

to shift the air.



I lean closer,

enough to know

the warmth of his skin,

the faint salt of it,

the way sleep invents

its own permissions.



He smiles

as if he knows

this version of me.



Even here,

I am aware

of what I am not doing.



The restraint follows me

into sleep.



Still,

his thumb moves once,

slowly,

as if tracing

the outline

of something unnamed.



The body answers

before thought arrives.



When I wake,

the room is unchanged.

Morning light

touches the wall

without interest.



My hands remember

what they did not do.



The feeling stays

a while longer,

not urgent,

not ashamed,

just present—

a quiet heat

under the skin.



I lie still

until it fades,

knowing that even in dreams

I am careful

with what I want.





From Night Poet-Vol One

By L Campbell

Neither Poison nor Pedestal

I am not the venom you drink.
Nor the altar you kneel to.
I am shadow meeting light—
a fractured sky
you once named devotion.

Your withdrawal is a mirror:
not reflection, but glass.
A closed window
where we tried to keep
something whole.

Between us
the weight of collapsing stars—
their fire
both gift and ruin.
Beauty burning
into ash
we still claimed.

I was never a crown.
Never the blade
you turn to blame.

I am the quiet
between notes.
The breath
Inside new snowfall.
What passes unheard
and still.

Neither poison.
Nor pedestal.

Nothing that could be made sacred—
was too slight —
yet nothing that could slip away,
so deep it lay.

Granada

Beneath the Alhambra’s glow,
the night unfolds in murmurs—
streets alive with the breath of centuries,
stone walls holding secrets
too soft to name.

In Albaicín’s tangled lanes,
strings rise—wild, uncontained—
music curling through jasmine-scented air,
where the past lingers like smoke:
sharp, fleeting, unforgotten.

The Darro moves slowly,
its waters weighted with reflection,
time suspended in its quiet flow.
A poet’s haven,
where beauty is not held
but released into the world—
unrushed, eternal.

Granada moves beneath your skin:
a rhythm, a pulse,
a gypsy’s dance beneath unwavering stars.
Cultures twist and entwine,
their edges softened by centuries,
their stories etched deep into the earth.

Sacromonte burns with life,
its caves alive with laughter,
the fleeting taste of fire and wine.
Granada does not keep you—
it frees you;
yet you carry its weight,
its touch,
its song.

This city sings for wanderers,
for those who belong nowhere
and everywhere.
Its spirit lingers,
whispering that freedom is not a place
but the way you move
when you let go.

The Child

The first cry came before dawn.
It threaded itself through the canvas seams of the camp,
a thin, insistent sound—too small for the weight it carried.

Noor woke at once. She knew the grammar of the camp by heart:
the cough that meant dust,
the low moan that meant hunger,
the sharp, sudden quiet that meant fear.
But this sound was different,
as if the night had opened and something fragile had slipped out.

Her mother was already tying her shawl.
“Stay,” she whispered.
But Noor was ten and made of questions,
so she followed—bare feet in worn sandals—
through the narrow paths marked by jerry cans
and yesterday’s ashes.

They reached one of the older tents,
its roof bowed from years of holding storms
that never arrived.
Inside, the air was heavy.
A young girl—eleven, maybe twelve—lay on a fraying mat,
her small body asked too early to bear the ancient work of women.
Sweat shone on her forehead like a second skin.

The midwife’s hands moved with the certainty
of someone who had learned to negotiate with pain.
Noor’s mother knelt beside the girl,
wiping her face with the hem of her scarf.
Noor hovered near the entrance,
a thin shadow waiting to be useful.

“Water,” the midwife said.
Noor lifted the jerry can with both hands.
Its weight pressed into her ribs—
the familiar heaviness of a world carried too far.

Outside, men argued about grain.
Inside, breath shortened around the girl’s labor,
each sound a small plea.

When the baby came, it did not cry.
It arrived quiet as a withheld question,
its skin the color of dust after rain.
The tent held its breath with it.

The midwife rubbed the tiny chest,
her palms drawing circles that felt almost like prayer.
Noor leaned forward,
her own lungs stalled in her chest
as if the child had borrowed her air.

“Come,” the midwife murmured.
“Come back to us.”

A gasp—barely.
Then another.
A fragile tether between body and world
pulled itself taut.

The girl-mother reached out with trembling fingers.
The women wept softly,
in the way grief-tempered women do—
tears held close,
strength held closer.

They wrapped the baby in what remained of a blue shawl,
a scrap of a life left behind.
“Sleep,” Noor’s mother told the girl.
“Sleep while the world is quiet enough to let you.”

Noor helped scatter sand across the blood-dark floor.
Her hands shook, though she did not know why—
only that something had crossed a threshold
and chosen to stay.

By noon, the story had walked the length of the camp.
Women arrived with what they could spare:
a palmful of rice,
a worn tin spoon,
a strip of cloth softened by years.
They laid these gifts beside the girl,
building a small fortress of tenderness
in a place that took more than it returned.

Noor watched from the entrance.
The women spoke her name quietly—
not as praise,
but as recognition.
In a camp where nothing belonged to anyone,
a child who did not look away
was a kind of light.

Night settled with its familiar sounds,
the fragile quiet that follows exhaustion.
Noor sat beside her mother at the stove,
watching the flame bend and steady itself
against the wind slipping through the seams.

“Will the baby live?” she asked.

Her mother stirred lentils in a dented pot,
the soft tapping like a heartbeat learning its rhythm.
“We do not know,” she said.
“But today she breathed.
Sometimes that is all the miracle we are given.”

Noor thought of all the children scattered across the world—
in camps without names,
in rooms borrowed from strangers,
in landscapes emptied by war and weather.
Children who carried their futures
in sacks of grain,
in memory,
in breath.

Lying beside her mother,
Noor listened to the overlapping sounds of the camp—
a baby’s thin, persistent cry,
a distant cough,
a thread of prayer unraveling and re-forming in the dark.

She pressed her hand to her chest,
feeling the steady thud beneath her ribs.

This, she understood,
was how the world began again—
not with declarations or maps,
but with children who continued breathing
in places designed for them to disappear.

One gasp at a time.



.

The Camp

When Noor first stepped into the camp, she felt as though she had entered a geography that refused to stand still. Canvas roofs shivered under the wind’s blunt hands. Smoke stitched itself upward from small fires, making a blurred ceiling between earth and sky. The ground was a language of footprints, worn into meaning by those who had walked too far with too little left to carry. The tents stretched as far as the eye could see—an entire horizon built from exhaustion and need.

There was a smell that lived in the camp, one no wind could carry away. With no rain for months, not a drop to settle the dust or cleanse the soil, the scent thickened and stayed. It was the odour of too many lives pressed into too small a space—waste pits filled faster than they could be dug, latrines that collapsed into the dry earth, water rations that never stretched far enough to wash what needed washing. It clung to canvas, to clothing, to the skin itself. At first Noor recoiled, walking with her breath held tight in her chest.

But in time she understood: the stench was not filth, not neglect. It was the smell of a place doing everything it could to keep people alive with nothing. It was the unavoidable truth of survival without water—a reminder that in the camp, every scent carried a story of what was missing.

Cholera lived quietly among them, the way a shadow accompanies light. It lingered in jerry cans that had been reused too many times, in puddles that should not have existed, in the cracked bowls children shared. No one spoke the word unless they had to; naming it gave it power. Yet everyone recognised its signs—the sudden weakness, the sinking eyes, the way a mother stitched worry into every movement. It was always present, always circling, as constant as the dust


The brittle quiet before dawn when queues formed at water points; the restless murmurs that rippled through the tents when ration trucks approached; the heavy, stilled heat of midday when even hope seemed to slow its breathing. Noor watched children trace imagined paths in the dirt while their mothers negotiated the mathematics of survival—how to divide grain, how to ration light, how to hold the family together with nothing but their own presence.

Her mother blended into the labour of the camp with a solemn dignity. She learned the rhythm of waiting, of bartering, of consoling strangers as though they were kin. Noor followed her through narrow paths marked by jerry cans and frayed ropes, absorbing every gesture. She learned to read her mother’s silences, the way her shoulders tightened when she thought of the river that once ran behind their home.

Every family had carried something into the camp—memories of land that had cracked under the drought, of children lost to fever, of harvests that had vanished like breath. Noor carried questions that pressed against her ribs: Why had the sky forgotten them? Why did nights echo more than days? Why did men stare toward the horizon as if hunting for a promise that no longer belonged to them?

In time, Noor began noticing the quiet rebellions that kept the camp alive: a woman mending a neighbour's torn shawl without being asked; an elder telling stories so children would remember a world bigger than the fences around them; girls braiding one another’s hair to remind themselves of beauty. These were small, almost invisible gestures—yet they were the architecture of survival.

The camp was harsh, but it was also tender in ways that outsiders would never understand. Noor learned how mornings tasted—metallic and cool before the sun broke open the day. She learned the scent of lentils cooking in battered pots, the voices  of volunteers calling names, the soft collapse of night when the sky glowed with distant, unreachable stars.

She learned, too, that hope was not a dramatic arrival. It grew slowly, like a seed watered by stories, by gestures, by the stubborn human insistence on tomorrow. It appeared in the way her mother smoothed Noor’s hair at dusk. In the rhythm of women singing as they prepared food. In the sound of children laughing, even in a place fashioned from such loss.

In the camp, Noor found no miracles—but she found people who refused to disappear.


.

The Crossing

When the last goat fell,
they took what the road would allow—
a pot, two jugs,
the red cloth her mother placed around her 
shoulders,
softening what the journey would harden.
Noor did not ask where they were going.
The horizon had been preparing her for years.

The morning they left,
the village stood unusually still,
as if the earth itself were holding its breath.
Women tied bundles with hands
that had once braided their daughters’ hair.
Men stood aside, knowing
there was nothing left to repair.
Even the dogs followed them to the road,
tails low, understanding before the children did.

They followed the salt road east,
the ground brittle beneath their feet.
Each dawn the wind arrived before the sun,
a warning more than a mercy.
Women walked in silence,
balancing what was left of their lives
on their heads and backs.

Noor learned quickly
that leaving was not one decision
but dozens—
which memories to carry,
which questions to swallow,
when to look forward
and when not to look back.
Her mother walked ahead,
steady as a metronome,
measuring distance instead of grief.

At the checkpoints
men with rifles pretended to read papers
no one could understand.
They searched the sacks,
took what was useful,
and told them to keep moving.
Noor learned the sound a mother makes
when she has nothing left to bargain with.

Sometimes they waited for hours—
lines stretching along the dust,
children wilting in the heat
like forgotten crops.
Soldiers smoked, joked,
argued about football and politics
with their boots on the backs of the desperate.
A woman ahead fainted;
the line stepped around her
as though collapsing were a kind of rudeness.

They slept where trucks had stopped before—
rings of ash, plastic caught in thorns.
Her mother’s stories grew shorter,
pared to their bones.
She spoke now of water
as if it were an ancestor
waiting to forgive them.

Nights were colder than Noor expected.
The stars hung low,
bright enough to see the shape of longing
on every face around the fire.
Some nights distant gunfire
threaded through the wind,
and mothers pressed palms
over their children’s ears
as if silence might be a shield.

On the road
Noor learned the weight of other people’s losses:
a boy carrying a broken radio
because it once played his father’s voice;
a woman dragging a sack
that held the clothes of a baby
she no longer spoke about;
an old man whispering prayers
to a photograph without a name.
In such a procession
every step became an act of remembrance.

On the seventh day
they reached the plain where the tents began,
a sea of white beneath a white sky.
Men shouted numbers,
women answered with names.
Somewhere a child cried
and everyone turned,
as though sound itself were food.

Here the wind smelled of hunger and detergent,
of latrines freshly dug,
of things meant to be temporary
but destined to last years.
Hundreds of tents flapped like torn pages
in a story no one wanted to read.
Aid workers moved briskly
between queues and clipboards,
their faces kind but tired,
their shoes too clean for the ground they stood on.

Noor’s mother knelt to rest,
pressing her palms into the dust.
Here, she said.
Here we will wait for God.
And Noor,
too tired to argue,
believed her.

That night she dreamed of the river—
not full, not healed,
but moving again,
slow as forgiveness.
In the dream she ran beside it,
barefoot and laughing,
the red cloth trailing behind her
like a banner of light.

Morning came soft and grey,
the kind of light that hides its origin.
Noor woke with the taste of river-water
still on her tongue,
and for the first time since they left,
she felt something rise in her—
not hope exactly,
but the quiet promise
that one day the earth might remember
how to be merciful.

The River Village

There had been no rain for three years.
The river lay split open,
its ribs whitening under a sun
that had forgotten restraint.
Children drew roads in the dust
where water once remembered its name.

The first year, the elders said
the clouds were only late.
They walked the fields with measured steps,
palms open to the sky
as if checking for a pulse.
Seed still went into the soil,
tucked in like sleeping children.

By the second year
the granaries had thinned
to a whisper of grain,
mice running where corn once stood in rows.
Women swept the floors twice,
gathering what the eye might have missed,
calling it supper.

In the third year
the sorghum heads shrank,
tight-fisted, refusing to open.
Trees kept their shade to themselves.
Even the wind grew light,
too tired to lift the dust.

Noor was born the year
the wells began to falter.
Her mother said the earth was fasting—
that God had turned His face
to see who would keep believing.

At night they waited for thunder.
Sometimes the sky trembled,
but no blessing came.
Even the goats learned silence,
their shadows thin as rope.

Hunger arrived in small negotiations:
one less scoop of porridge,
a cup of milk divided again,
the good plate taken to market
and not brought back.
No one called it famine.
They called it making do.

The men went north for maize,
returning with sacks half-empty
and eyes too full.
They spoke of other villages
where the river was only a rumor,
of roads lined with bones
that had forgotten their owners.

The women stayed,
guarding the bones of the garden,
stitching clothes from old fabric,
counting days by wings that passed
without landing.

In the evenings they thinned the stew
until it was mostly memory.
They broke bread in smaller pieces,
hands moving carefully
so the children would not see
how little there was to break.

Noor learned that waiting
was a kind of work.
She carried jugs larger than her arms,
walked to the river’s ghost,
and scooped what little glistened.
Her feet hardened, her voice learned patience.

She marked the season
by which animals disappeared—
first the chickens, then the cow,
then the goat whose bell
used to measure mornings.
Silence grew where bells had been.

School became a place
they visited when they could.
Some days the teacher dismissed them early,
saying the chalk felt too heavy.
It was the children’s faces,
more bone than last month,
eyes already older than the lessons.

At the edge of the village
a single tap coughed brown water.
Lines formed before dawn,
buckets waiting like open mouths.
Arguments began in whispers
and rose when the flow slowed.
Noor watched adults apologize to metal,
begging the pipe as if it could hear.

Her grandmother told stories
of another drought,
long ago,
when rain finally came
and the people danced until their feet bled.
We survived that one, she said.
This one will learn to fear us too.
But her hands shook
when she lifted the pot.

At dusk Noor sat with her mother
beneath the acacia’s tired shadow,
listening to stories about rain—
as if it were a relative
who might still come home.
Each story began in faith
and ended in dust.

Sometimes her mother fell quiet,
eyes fixed on a point
where sky met cracked earth.
In that silence Noor could hear
the questions the adults refused to ask:
how long before they left,
what they would carry,
who they might not be able to take.

Once, her mother paused,
looked at the child beside her,
and said quietly,
Even in a drought, light still travels.

Noor turned her face toward the heat
as if to prove her right.
The light stayed.
It always would.