The ash was never just ash. It was the fine, greasy residue of everything that had burned—the straw of my barley, the cedar beams of my storehouses, the wool of my flocks. It clung to my skin like a second mourning garment, gritty in the folds of my elbows, a constant taste of defeat on the wind-dried cracks of my lips. I would sit in it, by the heap of shattered pottery that was my only throne, and remember.

Remember when young men saw me and stepped aside, their voices dropping to whispers. When the aged rose, unsteady on their staffs, to stand until I took my seat. The chief men refrained from talking, laying a hand over their mouths. My counsel was like a drink of clear water in a drought; they waited for it. Now.

Now I am the tune for their mocking songs. The objects of their contempt are my brothers. They are young, yes, but not the virtuous young men of my memory. These are the offspring of such vile and nameless fathers I would have disdained to set them with the dogs of my flock. Men worn down by hunger, who gnawed the roots of the broom tree in the desolate washes. Driven out from the community, men shouted at as if they were thieves. They made their homes in the dreadful clefts of the wadis, in holes of the earth and of the rocks. They brayed among the bushes, a sound not human, huddling beneath the nettles, cast out even by the barren landscape.

And these. *These* are the ones who deride me.

They feel no compunction. To them, I am a byword. I have become a thing they spit at. They keep their distance, not out of respect, but out of a superstitious revulsion for my affliction. Yet they do not hesitate to throw off all restraint in my presence. In the midst of my weeping, they come with their jeering choruses. They trip my feet, the very feet that once walked in certainty; they build their roads of calamity for me, pushing me further into the ash-heap of my ruin. They are like a wide, breaking wave, and I am the scum it leaves on the shore. Terrors are turned loose against me; my dignity, that once-firm garment, is blown away like a cloak in a gale.

My soul is poured out within me. Days of affliction have taken hold of me. By night, the pain gnaws my bones; it gives me no rest, clenching like a vise. With great force, my clothing is disfigured, as though God Himself had grabbed me by the collar and shaken me like a sack. He has thrown me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes.

I cry out to You, but You do not answer. I stand, a spectre in my own ruins, and You do not regard me. You have turned cruel to me. With the might of Your hand, You persecute me. You lift me on the wind, a tattered banner of suffering, and make the storm dissolve my substance. I know it is for destruction You bring me. Like a tent pulled up by its cords, my life is collapsing, and the closing day is the weaver, cutting me from the loom.

But it is not just the body. The heart withers too. My harp is turned to mourning, and my pipe to the voice of those who weep. The music I knew, the melodies of contentment and praise, are strangled in my throat. I am left with this one, monotonous note: the cry that goes unanswered, the plea that meets only the hollow wind in the wadi, the same wind that carries the braying of those who mock me. They have found their philosopher-king in the ash-heap, and their philosophy is my despair.

And the silence afterward is the worst of it. The silence where an answer should be. The vast, appalling quiet of a universe that once felt so intimate with the Creator’s breath, now cold and unresponsive. The ash, finally, is just ash. And I am in it.