A dome of skeletal wood and heavy felt,
stands stark within the gallery’s white square,
a memory of where the ancestors knelt,
now catching only modern, sterile air.
Built by the hands of women through the ages,
who wove the walls and packed the heavy load,
it stands trapped like a creature in a cage,
a monument to survival on the road.
And inside dwells the poet, out of place,
enacting exile on a public floor,
this staging ground becomes his sacred space,
perpetually rootless and alone.
He aches to find the hearth, the shared accord,
where tribes once gathered for the closing day,
but modern ears are severed from the word,
and static drowns the songs they cast away.
A collective amnesia blurs the ground,
as primal wonders quietly dissolve,
yet here, within his circle, he is bound
to let the ancient mysteries revolve.
He watched the cyclical seasons come and go,
and read the cold, indifferent stars for signs,
but received no oracles to ease the blow,
no spark to guide his solitary lines.
Through age and ash he saw republics fall,
and watched as blind, modern empires collapsed,
imploding slow behind a concrete wall,
their fragile neon histories elapsed.
For words are tents that temporary rise,
shook by the winds of exile and of doubt,
the prophet watches with displaced, clear eyes,
forever looking in from deep without.
He breathes the raw, oil-scented wool and twine,
where sun-bleached cords and ochre fibers thread,
this felted cosmos, quieter than a shroud,
where the eternal nomad rests his head.