“of shards and fragments”
One story walks the desert,
learning to endure.
The other climbs the rock,
vanishing without answer.
Both leave fragments—
survival and absence—
to be carried, not resolved.
A cry begins,
cut short,
collapse denied,
endurance affirmed.
What cannot be answered
is carried instead,
a shard held together,
not abandoned to despair.
Imported order dissolves,
whether in white dresses or suburban fathers.
The land insists,
and the psyche learns to endure—
not with despair,
but with fragments carried forward,
a stoicism born of dust and rock.
.