When the Kite Broke Free

Royal Club for Literature and Peace 

When the Kite Broke Free

Sanjay Singh

When the Kite Broke Free

Whose footsteps should I trace,

when silence stretches like a desert,

and loneliness grows old in my veins

like a tree that bears no spring?

The world turned its face away long ago,

as if I were a fading star

lost behind clouds that no sky remembers.

My eyes, rivers untended,

spill their sorrow into unseen seas.

No shadow walks beside me,

no echo answers my call—

like broken mirrors, the past

shatters into pieces I cannot gather.

Why should I breathe in sighs

that rise like smoke from burnt-out dreams?

The nights are dead leaves,

crumbling in the hands of time,

their whispers no longer mine to keep.

The string slipped from my trembling hands—

that fragile thread of us,

like a kite torn free in a ruthless wind.

The companions of yesterday are only ghosts,

their names dissolve like ink in the rain.

And now, with no one left to claim,

I walk beneath an empty sky—

a wanderer in the ruins of memory,

where even remembering

feels like holding on to smoke.

Sanjay Singh

documentation: Waffaa Badarneh