The Listening Dunes

At dusk the dunes unroll like quiet sails, radio dishes tilt their silver throats to the sky, and the wind rehearses old names in grain.

A convoy of satellites crosses, soft as lanterns, stitching a seam of light along the ridge line; each blink is a pulse, each pulse a question.

Inside the control room, coffee cools in its cup, screens breathe with green rivers of static, we trace the noise and find a map of absence.

Later, the sand erases our bootprints, and the antennas return to sleep, pinned to stars; somewhere a signal arrives too late to be ours.