The Shape of Missing

Why do human beings instinctively recognise emptiness? Perhaps absence is humanity’s oldest symbol.

Tell me, what shape does absence wear?

For grief has never had a face,

nor longing any flesh or frame,

yet finds in every emptied place

a home that never bore its name.

It leaves no footprint in the dust,

no shadow any eye can trace,

and still we feel its quiet weight

wherever love has left a space.

An empty chair beside the fire

outlives the warmth it used to keep;

the table holds its old desire,

while silence settles in too deep.

One cup remains where hands once lay,

one place still set with absent care.

The room has not forgotten them,

though no one waits to find them there.

So too abandoned houses stand,their windows blind, their thresholds bare;not ruined merely—they withstandthe weight of someone's vanished prayer.Each staircase climbs to emptied light,each hallway gathers dust instead,as though the walls still dream at nightof footsteps long since turned to dead.

There is a circle in the worldthat fascinates us more than most:the wedding band, the pupil's ring,the moon adrift, the spectral hostof planets wheeling without end,the zero waiting to begin.What is a circle, after all,but something built around what's thin,

around a centre never shown,a little kingdom made of air,a promise that the empty throneit guards was worthy of such care.

Perhaps we drew our first round linenot to enclose, but to confessthat even nothing, once defined,acquires shape and tenderness.

A blank page waits with stranger poisethan one where every word is known.The unwritten line has louder voicethan all the verses overgrown.For possibility is whitebefore it darkens into ink,and every poem starts its lifeupon the edge of what we think.

Have you observed a parking spaceoutside a weather-beaten store,where every morning, year by year,the same blue Holden came before?Then, one cold Tuesday, it is gone.No plaque is hung. No bells are rung.The asphalt says no single word,yet every passerby feels stung.

We learn this language far too young.

Before we counted one by one,we counted who had failed to come.Before we named the stars above,we searched the dark for just one sun.Before we built our gods from stone,we buried those who would not wakeand found the earth could speak a tongueno living mouth could ever make.

Perhaps that was our first true sign.

Not fire, not blood, not beast

But the place beside the firewhere someone should have been.

For every symbol points toward meaning,

yet absence points to none at all.

It needs no alphabet or flag,

no cross set up against the wall.

A missing tooth. A missing note.

A bird that never learned to fly.

The second pillow left unpressed.

The coat still waiting by the sky.

We never stop to ask ourselveshow emptiness becamethe oldest language of the heart,the first to earn a name.

Perhaps because the world was never builtfrom what was merely there,but from the outline every soul once left upon the air.

And every life, however bright,however briefly cast,is known at last not by its weight,

but by the shapeit leaveswhen it has passed.

by Deeya Sabnani