The Dragon Sleeps

The river wore our sorrow like a crown,
each spring it rose and drank our children down.
We knelt before its muddy, ancient throne —
a dragon fed on flesh and blood and bone.

Then we, the small, the fragile, dared to dream:
to catch the monster's throat and hold its scream.
We carved a wound of concrete in the gorge,
and in that wound, a new world we would forge.

The dragon choked. It writhed. It learned to bow.
Its fury spins in turbines, silent now.
Where once it swallowed light, it gives it back —
gold bleeding through the villages once black.

We tamed the god that ruled us for so long.
Its heartbeat hums beneath us like a song.
And children read by lamps where mothers wept,
for we have woken now — the dragon sleeps.