The Negotiation

The ground remembers nothing yet— each blade of grass still dark with forgetting, roots coiled in their old sleep.

Light spills unannounced across the edge of hills, not gentle, not gradual, but breaking like a word finally, after hours of silence.

The air holds its breath between two colors. A bird tastes the difference, uncertain, as if dawn were a question that only the wings could answer.

Shadow shrinks to the underside of things— beneath the leaf, beneath the stone— gathering what remains of itself before it must dissolve entirely.

And the sun doesn't ask permission to remake the world once more, the same geometry in new light.