The Lingering Veil of Everthorne
beneath the sighing willows’ silvered bowers,
there lies a village time has disavowed—
its name erased by ivy’s creeping hours.
The stones, once proud, now whisper through the cracks,
of lovers lost to twilight’s cruel decree,
while rooks in crooked towers chant the facts
of hearts that beat where shadows walk as he.
A soul adrift, a wisp of breath unbound,
has trod these lanes where memory persists—
her form less flesh than echo’s hollow sound,
her voice the breeze that frosts the morning mists.
She haunts the thresholds where her footsteps died,
her eyes two pools of autumn’s fading light,
forever tethered to the other side
of love’s grim duel with destiny’s cold might.
One eve, when dusk bled into ashen night,
a boy, all curiosity and thorn,
unearthed a chest where rust had wed the light,
beneath the oak where vows were rent and sworn.
Within, a letter, frail as moth’s last wing,
its ink the color of a bruise’s ache,
bore words that trembled with the weight of spring
too long entombed by winter’s raw mistake.
*“To you, whose name the stars refuse to breathe,
whose shadow paints the dusk I call my own—
though rivers rise and mountains crack with grief,
no tide can drown the seed our hands have sown.
They say the heart forgets, but mine rebels,
each chamber stained with hues of your goodbye.
The church bell tolls for you in vacant peals,
while I, a ghost, in living’s garb, comply.”*
The specter watched—her essence clawed the air—
as syllables long buried met the moon.
The boy, unseeing, brushed the page with care,
unlocking years sealed in that paper tomb.
The village stirred as though from ageless sleep,
each word a spark to kindle phantom fires,
while she, the author of those tears unswept,
felt memory’s blade slice through her ghostly wires.
They’d met where brooks confide in lispering reeds,
two souls aligned by fate’s capricious hand.
His laughter wove through summer’s golden weeds;
her voice, a hymn that only he could stand.
But bloodlines deeper than the valley’s roots
had forged their chains with ancestral disdain.
Their fathers’ feuds, like wolves, tore love’s pursuits,
and locked their truth in silence’s tight chain.
One final dusk, beneath the oak’s broad arm,
they’d pledged their hearts to time’s unyielding vault.
He pressed this letter to her trembling palm—
a cargo meant to breach the looming fault.
But storms conspired with malice’s keen art;
the missive drowned in rain’s relentless pour.
She waited till the earth gnawed at her heart,
then let the river claim her, evermore.
Now centuries have gnawed the village’s bones,
yet still she drifts where petals choke the stream,
caressing words that never found their thrones,
her grief a never-ending silver scream.
The boy, unknowing, lays the page to rest
beneath the stone where daisies dare not bloom.
A wind ascends—the kind that haunts the west—
and sweeps the script into oblivion’s womb.
She reaches, but the past is quicksand’s lure;
the inked confessions crumble into naught.
The stars blink out. The mists, they now obscure
even the ghosts of battles she once fought.
Dawn breaks—a blade of amber, sharp and cold—
and where she stood, a single leaf descends.
The rooks chant on. The tale remains untold.
The village sleeps. The ache? It never ends.
