I’ve built my life in towers-
towers in breath- unlearned bricks,
faith staggered sideways,
and the sky: fingernail-thin,
bends, an unspoken groan.

all my gods are earthquakes-
their voices breaking at the root,
asking submission to the law
of gravity, or grace, or grief,
but never to the language
I was born to sing.

I unravel our silence backwards,
into vowels that wilt
before we speak them.

Into exile, skin sewn to the horizon’s rim,
perhaps there are no hands left to reach,
only echoes dressed as scaffoldings,
collapsing slow as a prayer unanswered.

And now I wander,  
a stranger in a foreign land,  
searching for pieces of a tower  
that was never meant to stand.