Truth’s Oasis Imperled

Reality cupped itself once as a clear oasis,
a blue, unblinking pupil in the skull of the desert,
where truth stood barefoot in shallow water,
washing dust from its own reflection.

Around it, trees stitched a quiet barricade of green ribs,
their limbs murmuring agreements with the sun,
their trunks remembering seasons when the wind
spoke only in passing, not in siege.

Then the sands began their patient revisions,
a child’s beginning lies buried like a glass bead,
a bargain bent just enough to pass in shadow,
honesty’s maps redrawn with trembling hands and steady greed.

Bootprints marched over softer footprints, erased them,
chronical-ink dried into laws that forgot their own beginnings.
The wind learned to carry these fragments,
flinging them like grit against the oasis skin,
until even the water tasted faintly of rust and omission.

Storms grew articulate,
they came howling with flags and fire echoes,
with walls raised to divide the same sky into enemies.

Voices sharpened into weapons,
truth fractured into mirrors held at accusing angles.

The trees groaned under the weight,
limbs locking, splintering, reaching,
their bark peeling like old promises
as they tried to hold back the advancing blur.
Some fell. Some bent into breaking shapes.
Some, uprooted, clutched at air
as though memory itself had weight enough to anchor them.

Yet…

Even the fiercest wind must pause to breathe.
In that fragile lull, the air clears its throat,
sand settles into uneasy stillness,
and the oasis, though smaller now, steadies its pulse.

From cracked trunks, green insists,
thin shoots, stubborn as whispered truth begin again

their quiet labor of holding with hands once clenched,

relearn how to cup water and how to gather what remains

without it being ground to dust.

And in that hush…

Before the winds remember themselves,
the last circle of shade draws closer, stronger,
root by root, word by careful word,
not to restore what was,
but to guard what still dares to hold true .