Cables of the Sleeping Cities

At the seabed, the cables lie like quiet veins, ink-dark, stitched through silt and memory, carrying the breath of faraway windows, a pulse of blue screens and rain-slick streets.

Above them, whales pass like slow commas, their songs curling around the hum of glass. A trawler lantern flickers, a lone vowel in the long sentence of the night.

On shore, the city sleeps with its sockets warm, lanes of light pooled in doorways and palms. Inside, a child dreams of a river made of fiber, fish of pure signal turning in the current.

Dawn comes, and the tide lifts its shutters; the cables continue, patient, listening. They do not speak, yet everything in us travels, soft as a hand on the back of the world.