The Ballad of Ashes and Ebony Strings
where sparrows nested in the lungs of saints,
he came—a wanderer with hands of smoke,
his violin cradled like a stillborn child.
The cathedral’s breath was clotted dust,
its stained-glass eyes wept shards of ancient light,
and there, amid the pews that curved like ribs,
he found her kneeling in a cloak of shadows.
Her voice, when first it trembled through the nave,
was autumn’s last leaf clinging to a branch—
a hymn half-whispered to the crumbled altar,
where once the wine had blazed like captured sun.
She turned, and in her gaze he saw the map
of all the wars that gutted silent towns:
the hollows where her brothers’ laughter slept,
the scar along her cheek, a moonlit river.
*“Play,”* she murmured, *“play as if the strings
could stitch the sky where bombs have torn its fabric.”*
He drew the bow—a breath, a blade, a sigh—
and from the ebony womb arose a sound
too tender for the century’s grim teeth.
The arches trembled, not from thunder’s fist,
but from the weight of notes that dared to bloom
in soil salted by the tread of boots.
Days slipped like beads from a broken rosary.
He carved their hours with melodies unnamed,
each measure steeped in glances never held,
in palms that hovered, close yet never clasped.
She brought him bread still warm from hidden ovens,
her fingers brushing his—a spark, a wound—
and in the dusk, they spoke of trivial things:
the way the rain composed its mournful chords,
the names of stars extinguished by the smoke.
But war, that raven perched on every steeple,
shook its wings and whispered through the ruins.
One night, the sirens howled their wolfish psalm;
the earth convulsed. She clutched his coat, her tears
a silver thread between his collarbones.
*“Stay,”* he begged, but duty’s chains (invisible,
inexorable) tightened round her throat.
*“The wounded wait. The ambulances cough
their feeble dirges. I must meet them there.”*
He played as dawn unspooled its gauzy light,
the strings now raw with grief’s unyielding edge.
The walls absorbed each note, each desperate cry,
as priests once swallowed sins from trembling lips.
When silence fell, it was a living thing—
a beast that gnawed the marrow from his bones.
He found her ribbon in the ashen mud,
its crimson faded to the hue of dusk,
and knew, before the telegram arrived.
Now, in the cathedral’s fossilized embrace,
he rots—a relic wrapped in soundless hymns.
The violin, unstrung, gathers dust and ghosts,
its hollow belly cradling a rose
she once tucked behind his ear, now petrified,
its petals black as the ink of her last letter.
The sparrows flee. The rafters sag. And still,
the shadows hum the tune he never finished—
a lullaby for love that starved in secret,
its roots cut clean by Time’s indifferent scythe.
