The Drought

the barns bulge with a perverse rot, heaps of fruit gone black and swollen, produce twisted in mildew and blight under the long dead eye of the sun.

and out on the land the cattle fall, one by one, legs buckling into the dust like broken prayers nobody’s listening to anymore.

frustration sworn into every cracked furrow, the soil itself turning traitor, sand burning under your boots till the soles of your feet remember every mile you ever walked for nothing. the seasonal rains, those old friends, nowhere, deserting the whole damn country, leaving nothing but a white-hot silence and the wind rattling bones in the fence posts. no cure, no cure at all.

just the sky stretched tight as a drum, beating down day after merciless day, the horizon shimmering like a lie you keep believing. kids with hollow cheeks hauling empty buckets from wells gone dry, old men staring at the ruined fields with eyes full of yesterday’s promises, everything parched and waiting, waiting, while the earth itself gives up its ghost in slow, dusty sighs.

cattle in the dust,
the rains that never came back,
bones in the fence posts.