confetti - The Hollow Crown: The Invention of Zero

(From The Birth of Numbers)

by Gil Ludere

The Hollow Crown: The Invention of Zero by Gil Ludere. As told by Olivia Grace.

They feared her,
this woman made of nothing,
this dot on the dusty tablet
between two ciphers of barley and debt.

She is not absence.
She held a place
like silence between drumbeats
or graves between kings.

She is the ontology of the void.
She is yearning.

Call her śūnya,
call her ghost,
she arrives last and makes sense of all.