the moon will be hidden behind a stained blue sky with crying clouds.
Did you hear me?”
I wonder, will it matter?
Does it matter?
He thoughtfully began the next chapter.
Hours later,
When a light rain could be heard,
she asked him,
“Do you love me?
Because at night the stars all become one heartbeat
and you may lose sight of mine.
Will that matter?”
Will that matter?
He finished his drink.
And she put down the remote.
They both smiled the same smile.
That same fading smile
which remains
though barely was
but remains.
In the bedroom,
the dog found a place near her pillow.
They looked into mirrors that showed the other’s reflection.
Sometimes truth starts a fantasy.
They asked,
or was it their images
“Do we love each other?”
Within a storm,
shadows and beauty
become one.
Without illusion, what has mattered?
Philip received his Master of Arts in Psychology from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He has published six poetry books, with another forthcoming. Three novels and two plays.He has a column in the magazine Per Niente. He enjoys all things artistic.
In the pure rose, fragrance enchants like casuarina song,
Welcoming light dwells on the island of living words.
A foolish saint rides a cloud palanquin beneath the Bodhi tree-
‘Amitabh’, veiled in shame, stands between sea and mountain.
Nearby, night jasmine blooms with artisan grace,
Shy aromas whisper poetic awakenings in the dark.
In the nectar sky, a school of stars gleams-The sun of Adinath grants thirst its eternal breath.
Love flows like Himchari’s waterfall, Inani’s sweetness-
After night, we’ll meet in the city of gold.
In the secret nor’wester, memories scatter-Time deceives with beauty unknown.
Words shimmer across eternity’s cover of light,
Tree-shadows inscribe the soul in enchanted sorrow.
NILOY RAFIQ
Born: August 6, 1983
Hometown: Maheshkhali, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh
Niloy Rafiq began his literary journey in his school years, contributing to the literary pages of local daily newspapers. His voice soon reached national prominence, with poems appearing in leading newspapers and little magazines across Bangladesh. Over time, his work transcended borders: more than a hundred of his poems have been published in international literary journals, magazines, and newspapers.
His poetry has been translated into over thirty languages—including English, Spanish, Swedish,Finnish, Albanian, Macedonian, Serbian, Russian,Ukrainan, German, Italian, Greek, French, Portuguese, Persian, Hebrew, Polish, Arabic, Urdu, and Chinese—testifying to its universal resonance.
Published Works
English Collections (Amazon, Latin America):
1. Sun Leaf
2. An Incomplete Kiss
3. White Stone (English and French)
4. The Fragrance of Fire (English and ltalian)
Bengali Collections:
1. Bishuddho Bishade Bhasi Ami Rajhans (I Float Like a Swan in Pure Melancholy)
2. Pipasar Paramayu (The Longevity of Thirst)
3. Nona Manusher Mukh (The Face of the Salt People)
4. Agnyato Agun (The Unknown Fire)
5. Ankhi Anka Adinath (The Eyed Adinath)
6. Momer Prarthonay Nato Matir Sharir (The Earthen Body Bowed in Waxen Prayer)
Niloy Rafiq. The Poet of a New Horizon: a book of review on the poet’s works, written by Poet Professor Gausur Rahman, a renowned literary critique and author of Bangladesh
Your accumulated brain is drained in the illusion of illusion;
The sensors of the brain are useless—lifeless robotic characters,
Invisible manholes at the bends of each galaxy,
A trap is waiting—a giant wave of scratching.
Innumerable drones circle your circle,
Keeping constant watch;
Monitoring your movements and course.
Where you have built a mansion of tranquility,
By pressing the button on the remote, you will absorb the pieces of the iceberg;
The desired ice water will melt in your brain server.
Look—
Every one of your limbs is trembling,
Shaking in fear of missiles.
Hydrogen and helium are full
The time for your existence to be destroyed is approaching
However, you are enjoying the mouth of death due to your carelessness.
The life takers are aiming at the sniper’s barrel.
Measuring the algorithm of time, the high vision of the hawk
Continuously approaching—intoxicated with prey.
Mohammad Qutubuddin.
24.08.2026
Mohammad Kutubuddin is CEO of Skymode International. He’s also a poet, editor, and writer. He’s the Chief Advisor at Novo Joti News and Founder of the National Writers Council. Also, he’s a Central Member of the Nationalist Writers’ Forum.
The first thing Elias Vale searched for after the plane came apart was a flint stone.
Not water. Not the pilot. Not the red emergency case he had seen beneath the rear seat before the world turned sideways. A stone. Something with an edge sharp enough to strike against steel, something old enough to know fire before men gave it names.
The fuselage had broken among black spruce on a high shelf of wilderness, its tail hanging twenty yards away like the discarded half of an animal. Fuel scented the rain. One wing burned in the moss with an orange flame too neat for what had happened. Elias stood in his torn shirt and listened for voices. He heard only the ticking of cooling metal and, far down the slope, water moving through rock.
He had been flying north to meet his father.
Professor Gideon Vale: archaeologist, seminary lecturer, excavator of ruined sanctuaries, expert in burial thresholds and the migration of sacred symbols. Elias had spent four unpaid semesters cataloguing pottery for the seminary’s field institute because his father called the position a fellowship and told him experience was a kind of payment.
The title had almost made him laugh. Fellow to whom?
He found a gray stone near the roots of an uprooted fir and tested its edge with his thumb.
Chert, maybe. Not flint exactly.
Good enough.
The pilot was dead. Elias knew before touching him. The man’s eyes were open toward the torn ceiling, and a white feather from the insulation rested at the corner of his mouth. Elias took the emergency knife, a half-full bottle of water, a lighter that clicked but would not catch, and the small signal mirror from the vest pocket.
His own phone showed a white spiderweb across the glass and no service.
“Of course,” he said.
His father had texted before takeoff: DELAYED AT SITE. WALK TO BASE CAMP IF THEY DROP YOU AT SOUTH STRIP. I MAY NOT BE THERE.
Not I’m sorry. Not I wish I could meet you.
The message felt now like an artifact retrieved from a civilization whose cruelty had been so ordinary no one had recorded it as cruelty.
Elias put the phone away.
He needed fire, shelter, and a route down to the river. He knew that. He had taken enough field methods courses to know the hierarchy of survival. But his hands kept looking for stone, for clean fractures and waxy surfaces, because stone was the one language his father had taught without touching him.
The bear appeared while Elias was kneeling beside a wash of gravel.
At first he thought the black shape beyond the alders was a burned stump. Then the stump moved sideways and became shoulders. A head rose. The distance between them seemed to collapse before either creature had decided anything.
Elias stood slowly.
The bear huffed.
He remembered every pamphlet at once: do not run, look large, speak calmly, back away, do not surprise, do not threaten, do not become prey.
“Hello,” Elias said.
The bear lowered its head.
“Bad day for both of us.”
It came forward.
Elias ran.
Branches whipped his face. The emergency knife struck his thigh through his pocket. Behind him, brush broke with a violence that seemed too quick to belong to flesh. He did not look back until the ground dropped from beneath his boots.
For an instant he was still running in air.
Then the ravine took him.
He struck a shelf of dirt shoulder-first, spun, hit a tree root with the back of his skull, and continued downward among stones that seemed to rise in turns to meet him. His mouth filled with the taste of pennies. He saw sky, root, sky, a white slab of granite, and then a childhood hallway.
Not a memory exactly. A door.
He was eight and waiting outside the principal’s office with blood on his school shirt because a boy had shoved him through the wired glass beside the gym. His mother had arrived first. She held a dish towel around his forearm because the nurse had run out of gauze.
His father was at a dig in Jordan.
“He called,” his mother kept saying.
Elias remembered staring at the phone on the receptionist’s desk as if love might crawl out of it if the cord were long enough.
The ravine turned him over.
At thirteen he had stood in a hospital corridor while his mother’s lungs drowned by degrees. Gideon arrived six hours after she died. He kissed Elias on the crown of his head and immediately began discussing the funeral with the chaplain, as if grief were a site requiring permits.
At sixteen Elias had been arrested for breaking the side mirror off a teacher’s car. Gideon sat across from him in the police station and said, “You understand consequences are a form of education.”
Elias had wanted him to ask why.
He never did.
Stone struck his ribs. Pain flashed white.
At nineteen, in the seminary annex, another fellow had followed Elias into the basement archive after midnight.
That memory did not come as pictures. It came as locks: the click of the stairwell door, the pressure of a wrist pinned wrong, the smell of dust and wool, his own mind abandoning the room before his body could. The other man had used him. Later, other people used older words for what had been done. Elias learned that one of those words was sodomy, and for months the word seemed to accuse the wrong person.
He showered until the dormitory water turned cold. He stopped answering friends. He stood once on the pedestrian bridge above the freight tracks and waited for the will to step forward.
His father came three days later because an administrator had called.
Gideon sat on the edge of Elias’s bed without removing his coat.
“You should speak to someone trained for this,” he said.
“I’m speaking to you.”
“Yes, but I’m your father.”
Elias waited for the rest.
There was no rest.
Gideon found a counselor’s card, placed it on the desk, and began explaining that trauma often confused memory, that reporting had procedural consequences, that Elias should not make a decision while distressed.
“Do you know what happened to me?” Elias asked.
His father closed his eyes for one second too long.
“I know what you told me.”
That answer became a room Elias lived in for years.
The ravine narrowed. Elias struck something hard enough that his breath vanished. He came to rest against a fallen cedar with one leg twisted under him.
Above, the bear appeared at the lip of the ravine.
It looked down.
Rain began, light and cold.
Elias tried to move his foot. Nothing happened. His left hand tingled. Blood slid warmly behind one ear.
The bear did not descend. It paced once along the edge and disappeared into the brush.
“You win,” Elias whispered.
He thought of the trip’s purpose. Gideon had found something at the seminary excavation—a set of carved stones, his last message said, “possible threshold iconography, anomalous sequence.” He had asked Elias to come because Elias knew the catalog system better than anyone. Not because he missed him. Not because they needed to speak.
Because Elias was useful.
The rain strengthened.
He pulled the gray chert from his pocket. During the fall it had split. The fresh face shone darkly, almost blue.
His father would have approved of the fracture.
Elias laughed once and immediately coughed blood.
He pressed the stone into the mud beside his cheek and thought, absurdly, of writing a field label.
OBJECT: MAN.
CONTEXT: COLLAPSED.
PROVENANCE: DISPUTED.
Then the cedar, the rain, the ravine, and the whole known world went out.
PART II
He woke to the sound of an oar entering water.
There was no pain.
Elias opened his eyes and found himself lying in the bottom of a narrow boat whose wood was pale as old bone. The sky above him was enormous. Crepuscular clouds folded from violet into rose, lit beneath by a sun he could not locate. Rain hung in the distance like silver hair but had not yet reached the water.
He sat up.
On every side stretched a lake without visible shore, yet the country rose from it in impossible nearness. Houses stood on green islands with white walls and roofs of blue-black tile. Meadows descended directly into water. Fens shivered with reeds taller than a man. Beyond them, hills had been cut into terraces so precise they looked written upon: barley, vines, flowering beans, red-leafed orchards, bands of saffron yellow and lucid green.
People—or figures like people—moved far away among the terraces. Bells sounded from somewhere behind the rain.
Elias touched the back of his head. No blood.
His clothes were clean.
“What kind of coil,” he said, “does a person have to shed to deserve this?”
The rower behind him laughed.
Elias turned.
The man was narrow, ageless, and dressed in a dark coat despite the warm air. His hair fell to his shoulders in gray-black waves. He rowed with one oar, changing sides without causing the boat to turn.
“You ask about deserving before asking where you are,” the rower said. “This delights me.”
“Where am I?”
“Reached Lands.”
“Reached by what?”
“By you.”
Elias looked at the water. It held the sky so perfectly that the oar seemed to cut through clouds beneath them.
“Are you dead?” he asked.
“Frequently.”
“Am I?”
The rower considered him with open pleasure.
“You are the seeker,” he said. “For whom I elate.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I have been lonely.”
The boat passed close to an island where women in white aprons shook rainwater from carpets patterned with golden birds. A child ran after a hoop. A black dog slept beneath a fig tree. Everything looked unbearably complete.
The rower rested his oar across his knees.
“You may call me Oberon.”
“That’s your name?”
“No. I enjoy it.”
“What is your name?”
“No.”
Elias almost smiled.
Then Oberon leaned forward and studied him with the tenderness of a physician discovering a symptom.
“A sodomite,” he said softly. “For whom grows the hemlock, creased in the dampened hollow where Nature remains fallen with her young tresses.”
Elias stopped breathing.
“What did you call me?”
Oberon dipped the oar.
“You heard.”
“I was assaulted.”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t make me—”
“No.”
“Then why say it?”
“Because the word followed you farther than the man did.”
Elias stood too quickly. The boat barely moved beneath him.
“You don’t get to do that.”
Oberon’s eyes widened, not in alarm but admiration.
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Protest is one of the few honest instruments brought from Earth.”
“You make a filthy accusation and then congratulate me?”
“I made no accusation. Your world made it. I merely showed you the brand still smoking.”
Elias stared at him.
Oberon rowed on.
They passed a flooded orchard where pears floated among the branches without falling. On a low bank, an old man repaired a roof while rain passed through his body and struck the shingles beneath. Farther on, a procession carried empty chairs into a meadow and arranged them facing the west.
“What is this place?” Elias asked.
“A place reached.”
“By the dead?”
“By those who arrive.”
“Same thing.”
“Earth trained you to love categories because categories can be buried in neat rows.”
“My father would like you.”
“Your father likes the dead because they cannot interrupt his theories.”
Elias felt anger rise so quickly it frightened him.
“You know him?”
“I know the shape he left in you.”
Oberon’s answer was quiet.
For a while they moved without speaking. Rain finally crossed them—not drops, but a soft vertical brightness that cooled Elias’s face and vanished before touching the bottom of the boat.
On another island, terraces climbed toward a palace no larger than a farmhouse until Elias looked away; when he looked back, it covered half the hill.
“This is beautiful,” he said despite himself.
“Yes.”
“That feels like a trap.”
“Yes.”
Oberon smiled.
“You are improving.”
Elias asked why the rower had been waiting. Oberon said he had not been waiting, exactly. He had been rowing. Waiting was what people called motion when they disliked its direction.
“How long?” Elias asked.
“Long enough to prefer ‘Oberon’ to several better names.”
“And you’re happy I came.”
“I elate.”
“That is not how that verb works.”
“Here it is.”
They entered a channel between banks of lavender-colored grass. White cattle drank from one side. On the other stood a row of unfinished houses, each with a table set inside and no roof above it.
Oberon looked at Elias suddenly.
“Remain.”
It was the first word he had spoken without wit.
“What?”
“Remain in the Reached Lands.”
“You just said we were going somewhere.”
“We are.”
“Then why ask me to stay?”
“Because asking after departure is useless.”
His face had changed. Beneath the amusement was fear.
Elias sat very still.
“What’s ahead?”
Oberon resumed rowing.
“A larger channel.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No.”
The lavender banks widened, and the water darkened from mirrored blue to the color of iron. The air acquired a faint warmth. Bells ceased behind them. Elias noticed that every distant figure in the fields had stopped moving.
Ahead, the channel opened.
At first Elias thought the horizon was red with sunset.
Then the horizon moved.
There were boats.
A thousand, perhaps more, assembled on the wider water in ranks so vast that their masts made a forest. Some were long as freighters. Others rose three and four decks high, broad enough to carry orchards. Their silhouettes were unmistakable: hull, mast, rigging, rudder, prow. Vessels made for distance.
But no timber had built them.
The nearest hull flexed.
Its sides were paneled in skin.
Not hide, not leather prepared by tanning, but pale human skin joined in enormous overlapping fields, pores visible where the water lifted it. Seams ran from bow to stern like surgical scars. At intervals, ribs curved outward as braces, ivory arcs wet at their lower ends. The boat breathed. Elias could not call the movement anything else. The planking expanded by fractions, paused, then drew inward, sending dark ripples across the channel.
Its mast was a column of vertebrae bound by glossy cords. Between each bone sat a disk of cartilage, and when the wind shifted the whole mast bent with terrible grace instead of creaking.
“What—” Elias began.
Oberon did not answer.
Another vessel crossed their path at a distance. Its sails were translucent and veined. Light passed through them pinkly. Elias watched wind inflate what looked like acres of membrane, and the veins darkened as if blood had been driven into them by the gust. Along the lower edge, eyelids had been stitched together in a fringe. They opened one after another as the sail filled.
Hundreds of eyes regarded the water.
Some were brown, some blue, some milk-white. One rolled until it seemed to find Elias.
He looked away and saw worse.
The rigging was braided hair and tendon. Knots tightened themselves. Great blocks swung from hooks made of fused finger bones. The anchor of one ship was a pelvis widened with hammered metal, its chain a procession of interlocked jaws. Teeth clicked beneath the surface when the vessel drifted.
A crew in bright clothing moved over the decks laughing.
They looked human. Alive.
A woman stood at the rail drinking from a silver cup. Two men played dice upon a table whose grain, Elias realized, was not wood but the whorled pattern of a giant fingernail. Children ran between coils of rope. Musicians tuned instruments near the stern.
None of them seemed to notice what carried them.
“Do they see it?” Elias whispered.
“They see a ship,” Oberon said.
“So do I.”
“No. You see its grammar.”
The next boat had a prow shaped from a cluster of faces fused cheek to cheek. Their mouths formed the line where spray broke. Each time the bow struck a wave, the mouths opened together and expelled a low chord. The sound passed through Elias’s chest like organ music.
Behind that vessel came one whose lower hull was dark red muscle exposed to air, the fibers arranged lengthwise as though the entire ship were a single leg straining through water. Every contraction drove it forward. Its rudder was a shoulder blade. Its deck was paved with squares of hardened tongue.
The smell reached them then: salt, iron, milk, smoke, roses left too long in a hot room.
Elias covered his mouth.
The fleet extended farther than vision. Some ships were white with fat, buoyant and softly luminous. Others were blackened as if roasted, their surfaces lacquered by heat. One carried three masts made from femurs bundled into towers. Another had no mast at all; six enormous lungs rose and collapsed on its deck, inflating sails from within. Their exhalations made fog.
There were beautiful ones.
That frightened Elias most.
A narrow crimson cutter passed with a hull polished smooth as a lip. Pearls had been set along its rail, until one pearl blinked and he understood they were eyes coated in something nacreous. Its figurehead was a pair of hands clasped in prayer. Each fingertip held a tiny flame.
A barge behind it had gardens growing from its deck. White flowers rooted in exposed marrow. Bees entered hollows in long bones and emerged dusted gold. From a distance it might have been a wedding boat.
Then Elias saw the keel trailing beneath the water: a braided spinal cord thick as an ancient tree.
The boats bumped one another gently as the channel narrowed toward something not yet visible. Wherever two hulls touched, skin dimpled against skin.
“You said this place was reached,” Elias said. His voice trembled. “Where are they going?”
Oberon’s oar rested motionless.
“The Unreached Lands.”
A ship close by erupted in cheers. Its captain, a broad woman wearing a coat embroidered with pomegranates, had climbed onto the rail. She raised a bottle and shouted toward the fleet. Other captains answered. Horns blew. Drums rolled across decks stretched with skins Elias refused to identify.
“What’s there?” he asked.
“Feast.”
Oberon counted on his fingers.
“Folly. Sex. Music. Babies enough to repopulate dead empires. Palaces where every room opens into summer. Wine that remembers the grape. Fruit that bruises when you think of biting it. Beds large enough for dynasties. The captains have been promised abundance without accounting.”
“And the crews?”
Oberon looked at him.
Elias already knew.
“No.”
“The crews are the accounting.”
A gust crossed the channel. Every membrane sail snapped at once. The sound was like a city slapping its hands against a wall.
“They’re going to be killed.”
“Slaughtered,” Oberon said. “The word is uglier and therefore nearer.”
“For the feast?”
“For many feasts.”
Elias looked at the laughing children on the nearest deck.
“They don’t know.”
“They know they were invited.”
“That isn’t the same thing.”
“Very little is.”
The awful fleet seemed suddenly ceremonial. Garlands hung from rails. Lanterns glowed in sockets made of skulls. Banners streamed from muscle-masts, painted with suns, lions, crowns, lovers, grapes, infants, musical notes. Every emblem promised life while the material beneath it testified to consumption.
Elias saw a sailor lean over a rail and trail his fingers in the water. Beneath his hand, the hull twitched.
“Where did the boats come from?” Elias asked.
Oberon closed his eyes.
“From the last feast.”
Elias turned to him.
“No.”
“The remains are useful.”
The phrase was so much like his father that Elias almost struck him.
Bones for structure. Skin for sail. Tendon for line. Fat for lamp oil. Teeth for fastening. Hair for cordage. Blood thickened into pitch and pigment. Nothing wasted. A civilization of perfect reuse.
Elias imagined banquet tables being cleared not into graves but shipyards.
The fleet around him became an equation that solved itself through appetite.
For the first time he understood why the vessels were beautiful. Beauty was not mercy. Beauty was how the invitation reproduced.
He bent over the side of Oberon’s little pale boat and retched, but nothing came from him.
“You wanted me to remain,” he said when he could speak.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Oberon watched the great ships pass.
“Because I have delivered many who believed heaven was the absence of refusal.”
“Delivered where?”
“Forward.”
“And what happened to them?”
“You have seen the boats.”
Elias looked down at Oberon’s vessel.
Pale as old bone.
He touched the gunwale.
Wood.
He hoped.
“What are you?”
“A rower.”
“Were you ever crew?”
Oberon’s smile returned, but it had no joy in it.
“I liked another name then.”
The great channel narrowed toward two vertical darknesses standing in the distance. They were not doors exactly. The sky bent around them. Water poured toward them without lowering. Between the dark pillars hung a region of gold light so intense it made every flesh-built vessel cast a shadow backward toward the Reached Lands.
The metaphysical gates.
Elias understood without being told.
Oberon set the oar in the water again.
Their little boat turned toward the gates.
“No,” Elias said.
Oberon rowed once.
“You said remain.”
“I pleaded.”
“Then stop.”
“I cannot stop after the larger channel.”
“You brought me here.”
“Yes.”
“Take me back.”
“No.”
The word was gentle, and that made it worse.
Elias grabbed the oar. Oberon did not resist. For one second they both held it.
“What happens if I jump?” Elias asked.
“You enter the water.”
“And?”
“You discover why the boats float.”
Elias released the oar.
The golden opening between the gates widened. Music drifted from beyond it—drums, strings, laughter, the dense human roar of a festival too large to imagine. He smelled bread. Rain. Charred meat. Orange peel. A perfume his mother used to wear.
His knees weakened.
“That’s cruel.”
“Yes.”
“What do they want from me?”
“The Unreached Lands want nothing. Wanting is what arrives.”
“And my soul?”
Oberon looked directly at him.
“Will not return to Earth.”
Elias thought of his body in the ravine: rain gathering in his hair, the broken chert beside his cheek, perhaps rescuers days away, perhaps his father standing eventually above a zipped bag and asking someone for coordinates.
He thought of waking.
He thought of not waking.
“Am I being punished?”
Oberon shook his head.
“That is the oldest vanity. To imagine terror must be about justice.”
“Then why me?”
“Because you arrived.”
The answer hurt more than judgment.
Elias watched the captains cheer as the first enormous ships approached the gates. He watched their crews set tables on deck, pass bottles, tune fiddles, lift children to their shoulders so they could see the golden country ahead.
He remembered Gideon saying consequences were a form of education.
For once Elias wanted no lesson.
He wanted only to see.
That desire frightened him because it felt pure.
“What if I agree?”
Oberon’s hands tightened on the oar.
“To what?”
“To go.”
“You are going.”
“No. You know what I mean.”
Oberon searched his face.
Elias looked back at the Reached Lands. The terraces were far behind now, bands of green under the violet storm. Rain walked across them in luminous curtains. Houses shone warmly. Somewhere back there were chairs facing west, pears floating on branches, a dog asleep beneath a fig tree. A place beautiful enough to remain in forever, if remaining had still been possible.
His father had spent a career studying thresholds, as though a threshold mattered because it separated two rooms.
Maybe the important thing was that someone chose to cross.
Elias felt anger at that thought because it sounded like Gideon.
He laughed.
“What?” Oberon asked.
“I spent my whole life waiting for my father to explain what happened to me.”
“And?”
“He never could.”
“No.”
“I thought if I understood it, I’d get my life back.”
Oberon said nothing.
“The word you called me—” Elias continued. “It isn’t mine.”
“No.”
“The shame isn’t mine.”
“No.”
“The wanting to die was mine.”
“Yes.”
Elias flinched.
Oberon leaned toward him.
“And the wanting to live was yours also. Do not make an idol of only one desire.”
The gates towered ahead. The nearest flesh-ship crossed between them.
For an instant its membrane sails became transparent enough that Elias saw the silhouettes of hundreds of bodies inside the hull, not passengers—materials, layered and joined. Then golden light swallowed the vessel.
A roar of celebration came from beyond.
Another ship followed.
Then another.
Elias’s fear did not lessen. It clarified.
He understood that agreeing to see the Unreached Lands was not bravery. It might be surrender. It might be curiosity so violent it had eaten self-preservation. It might be the old bridge above the freight tracks in a new costume.
But it was his decision, and for once no father, counselor, dean, assailant, pilot, bear, ferryman, or god would be allowed to rename it after the fact.
“I’ll see them,” he said.
Oberon inhaled sharply.
“The Unreached Lands.”
“Yes.”
“You understand the boats.”
“As much as anyone can.”
“You understand I cannot promise captaincy.”
“I don’t want a promise.”
“You understand feast may mean being eaten.”
“I understand your words mean less the closer we get.”
For the first time, Oberon laughed without mystery.
“That is exceedingly good.”
He rose in the boat.
Around them, a thousand vessels of blood and flesh moved toward the impossible gates, their eye-fringed sails full, their bone masts bending, their crews singing of pleasures they had not yet paid for. The smell of rain came from the Reached Lands behind them. The smell of the feast came from ahead.
Oberon lifted the oar and pointed it toward the golden breach.
“Look, seeker.”
Elias looked.
Beyond the gates he could not see palaces or tables or bodies. He saw only brightness arranged in depths, like doors opening behind doors. Somewhere inside it, music changed key.
Oberon’s face became radiant with the old, unsettling eagerness.
“Be elated,” he said.
Elias gripped the sides of the boat.
“As you are?”
“As I am.”
The little vessel entered the shadow of the first gate.
The water beneath them turned gold.
Oberon whispered the word again—elated—as though it were not an emotion but a direction.
And Elias, who had spent his life asking absent men to tell him what things meant, let the question fall behind him.
The gate opened.
Ali Hasnain is an Information Science student at CUNY School of Professional Studies in New York.
And Justice will no longer be only a porcelain statue.
To truly grow old
Ancient wisdom growing old,
Unnoticed, in our rivers of blood.
A breathing library we have at hand,
Yet we still think and learn like a mechanical mind.
Our earth and we are all deeply bound,
To each other like a massive DNA cord.
Transferring wisdom and secrets so old,
Our earth communicates with us, but it goes unheard.
We realise less in our mechanical mind,
And assume everything with an ignorant pride.
Breaking patterns and truly growing old,
Are concepts unknown to our programmed mind.
The more we grow old with a programmed mind,
The less we grow old in soul and find,
It’s not by only age and anatomy we grow old,
But by diving into the wisdom within our blood.
So let’s redefine how we grow old,
And override our mechanical mind.
Rediscover our soul and rewrite the mind,
To grow old in all body, soul and mind.
Loved by you once
The brilliant strategies in your mind,
Made even Athena question her wisdom.
A violet maze of libraries,
That made all owls hoot in grey.
The sheer beauty in your eyes,
Made even Medusa freeze in her step.
A green forest in the morning,
That made all trees bow in green.
The great blaze in your trust,
Made even Eurydice forget her lover.
A rose garden in the snow,
That made all flakes blush in red.
The vast devotion in your soul,
Made even Hades move to his knees.
A grand ocean of embrace,
That made all stars long in blue.
The perfect clarity in your love,
Made even Eros lose his fame.
A pearl river in the summer,
That made all ripples swirl in ember.
The pure gold found in your heart,
Made even Midas turn into gold.
A sunflower field in the sunrise,
That made all bees dance in yellow.
So when i asked how someone otherworldly like you
Could be in love with me,
Adonis — who could not even hold your gaze — said to me,
“Well, he turned down Venus twice,
Just to be loved by you once.”
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Kushi Nanayakkara is a Sri Lankan born poetess who brings nature, human experiences, and creativity together through poetry. She studied Graphic Design/Information Technology before finding her way into poetry in 2020.
Her work often revolves around themes such as nature, art, life, love, mind, death, philosophy, and social themes such as justice and humanity. Her poetry was featured in literature websites in USA and India and newspapers in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Her poetry was also published in poetry anthologies and magazines in India, Iraq, USA and the Philippines. Her sincere wish is to inspire hearts to stay creatively conscious and continue refining her craft.
