The Ash Road

I walk alone, 

through streets where silence burns, 
where the air is thick with memory, 
and the ground whispers of endings. 

Figures drift in queues, 
lined like shadows waiting for nothing, 
their faces blackened, 
their eyes hollowed by smoke. 
They move as if commanded, 
yet I move apart— 
a solitary traveler, 
untethered from their rhythm. 

Ash clings to my steps, 
but I do not falter. 
I carry no sorrow, 
no joy, 
only the stillness of one 
who has seen fire consume 
and yet remains. 

The crowd dissolves into dust, 
their exits quiet, 
their emotions erased. 
But I remain— 
not as a victim of the flame, 
but as its witness, 
its survivor. 

In the emptiness, 
I feel a strange renewal: 
the ash is not only death, 
but soil for unseen seeds. 
And though I walk alone, 
my silence is not despair— 
it is the calm of a soul 
that knows impermanence, 
that knows the weight of endings 
is also the breath of beginnings.