Lost No Longer
In the swamp, the air was heavy with memory— water thick as sorrow, roots tangled like the mind of a man who has forgotten what light feels like. He wandered, half spirit, half wound, drifting through cypress shadows that whispered his name without mercy. Every step was a prayer he didn’t believe in. But the desert called— not with words, but with silence so vast it swallowed his doubt whole. The wind stripped him bare, peeled away the moss and grief until only bone and breath remained. The sun burned through his illusions and found a glimmer beneath— a spark that still remembered flight. When the dust rose in spirals, he followed it upward, skin to feather, heart to horizon. The hawk that broke from his chest was not an escape but a return— to clarity, to spirit, to the endless communion of sky. Now he circles with the cloud spirits, where the swamp’s sorrow cannot reach, where the desert wind hums forgiveness, and the lost man is lost no longer.