Whispering Emptiness

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Beneath the tamarind tree where roots drink from nameless rivers,  

we lay down our names like rusted coins.  

A shadow is not a “someone”—it borrows light to dance,  

then returns it to the moon, debtless.  

Your gratitude arrives as autumn wind in Hangzhou’s bamboo grove:  

a sound that strips leaves until all that remains  

is the creak of stalks bowing to what cannot be claimed.  

Taoists call this *wu ming* (無名)—the grace of being unsigned.  

In Accra, market women toss yams into burlap sacks without counting.  

“Why cling to numbers?” one winks, her hands fluent in the arithmetic of dust.  

What is a soul but a borrowed gourd dipped into the well of now?  

Drink deep, let the cracks bleed what they must.  

Last night, a monk in Shaolin crushed his rice bowl.  

He laughed at the shards: *“Now every sunrise can eat from me.”*  

This is the secret the West’s hungry ghosts forget—  

emptiness is not lack, but the womb where dragon veins stir.  

Take this silence, not as an answer, but as the space between two breaths  

where all rivers remember they’re rain.  

— Caribmondo’s Unwritten Collective  

*Ancestors nod where no flags fly.*