Empty Fields
He crosses earth gutted by centuries of drought
Past furrows that once bore wheat but now only doubt
Under a sky washed pale by prayers unanswered
With footsteps that echo the old world’s cancer.He moves
through the bones of the harvest, through orchards dry as bone
Each stalk a monument to hunger,
each root a whispered moan.The wells are choked with memory,
the rivers drawn and spent
Grain silos stand like tombstones, their bellies cracked and bent.
Where once the soil breathed fertility—deep and black—Now dust curls in eddies,
uncoiling every track
And the wind that carried rain now hums with despair
Lifting ash from old campfires,
empty as the air.Rats pick the carcass of last season’s dream
Children gnaw on leather, the old forget how to scream
While hope retreats into stories, half-remembered and thin
Told around empty pots, voices hollow as tin.
He is the hunger that walks with the old ones at dusk
The fever that tightens in throats grown coarse with musk
The slow wasting of muscle, the trembling of knees
The song of the grasshopper carried by the breeze.He is every seed
that rots in the palm of a hand
Every lover who bargains for food in a ruined land
Every mother whose milk turns bitter with grief
Each furrow unturned, every stalk left a sheaf.
He withers the marrow beneath children’s pale skin
Their bellies distended, their laughter worn thin
Their ribs mapping hunger in ridges of pain
Their futures collapsing, unmourned by the rain.He
rides the night wind with fingers of frost
Turning abundance to shadow, blessing to loss.He is the cracked lip,
the fevered brow
The memory of bread denied to the now.
Villages crumble in his wake, dust sifts through the cracks
Shops empty, windows shattered,
doors barred against lack.His name is whispered in every language—Famine, Hunger,
Want—The last breath of cattle,
the prayer in the gaunt.The sickle hangs rusted in barns stripped bare
The fox skulks silent, the crows circle the air.Poppies grow wild
where the children once played
Their petals the color of debts left unpaid.
He is not merciful, nor does he rage
His is the slow undoing, the blank of the page
A silence deeper than mourning, a pain without sound
A hunger so ancient it haunts every town.The old ones remember the taste of the
past—Honey on bread, milk pouring fast—But
the young know only the ache in their bones
And the songs of the dying that shudder through stones.
The rivers recede, the cattle collapse
Each sunrise a sentence, each sunset perhapsThe
last light on faces gaunt as the moon
A lullaby howled to a famine-tuned tune.He passes unseen,
but his shadow is castIn the hollow of bellies,
in fields growing fastWith nothing but sorrow, with nothing but dust
Where the gods used to linger, now silence and rust.
When the rains finally come, they taste bitter and thin
Filling pits not with promise,
but with what should have been.Children learn to bury the names of their kin
Planting them deeper than seeds ever win.And the world, when it turns,
does so grudging and slow
Haunted by ghosts in the furrows below—For once famine has passed,
its shadow remains
A scar in the soil, a memory of chains.
And the hungry are haunted, for generations they’ll dreamOf green wheat and apples,
of rivers that teem
But the fields will remember—the ghosts never rest—Empty earth clutching
the bones to its chest.So if someday abundance returns to the plain
It will taste of salt, and it will taste of pain.For famine is not gone
when the harvest is high—It lingers in stories, in the set of the eye
In the tremor of hands that have nothing to hold
In the hush at the table, in memories cold.
And when he is gone, the silence remains—Empty bellies,
barren plains.The ghost of famine rides with dawn,Haunting the living,
long after he’s gone.