Malcolm Gladwin

When Sky Does Not Answer

If this life is an Unlit altar

I press my voice into the windless dark,

as if breath alone could shape an answer.

Knees sunk deep in brittle earth,

I offer silence where hymns once rose.

 

No fire falls. No veil stirs above me.

Only the hush of those illuminated stars

burning through questions

older than any creed.

 

Once this world felt held

a warm, unseen hand of meaning.

Now this endless sky just stares back

like great eyes looking down: vast, flawless, and mute.

 

I build no temples, only marks in sand,

each one unseen before it\'s known.

A ritual of reaching

toward something that may never reach back.

 

Is this devotion or defiance

to keep shaping the shape of longing

when no hand returns the touch?

 

Still I rise,

not redeemed, not refused,

but marked by the gesture

of asking.