The Knight’s Lament: Shadows of a Vanished Hearth
Where swallows weave their dusk-reluctant flight,
A knight in battered silver treads the high
And lonesome path where stone outlives the light.
His visor, raised to winds that smell of thyme,
Reveals a face carved deep by time’s cruel blade—
Not scars of war, but furrows wrought by grime
Of countless leagues where childhood’s specters fade.
Before him lies the vale, its contours known
As breath within his lungs, as blood’s own song—
The crooked spire, the brook’s once-joyous tone,
The hill where ewes and memory belong.
Yet now the churchbell’s throat is choked with rust,
The stream a serpent’s husk in cracked ravine,
The pastures strangled thick with creeping dust,
And every window blind, no lamp between.
“O wraith of Amesbury!” his voice, a storm
That breaks against the silence of the stones,
“Where are the faces warm as rising storm,
The hearths that laughed in firelit cadences?
Here stood the smith whose anvil rang at dawn,
Old Margery with her rosemary and rue,
The millwheel turning seasons long withdrawn…
What plague of years has stolen all I knew?”
A whisper stirs the nettles at his heel—
Not wind, but words half-muffled by the earth:
“No plague, good sir, but Time’s unyielding wheel
That grinds both love and loss to equal worth.
The children left for cities clad in smoke,
The elders sank like suns into the clay,
The roofs, unburdened by their tenants’ yoke,
Now bow to kiss the dust where memories play.”
He turns, but naught remains save twilight’s veil
And shadows stretching gaunt as famine’s hand.
Yet through the gloom there glimmers, faint and pale,
A lantern’s ghost where once his boyhood stand.
Through briars clutching like a miser’s fingers,
Past gates that rot on hinges of despair,
He stumbles where the past’s faint echo lingers—
A cottage, crouched beneath its thatchless hair.
The door, ajar as though in mid-lament,
Reveals a hearth where spiders spin their woe.
There, in the corner where the plaster’s rent,
A phantom cradle rocks with none to slow.
His gauntlet brushes ash once sweet as bread—
A spark ignites the vision in the soot:
His mother’s hands, her lilac-scented tread,
The honeyed steam of elderflower brew.
“Stay!” cries his soul to shadows on the wall,
“Let not this tapestry unwind to air!
Here, by this fire, I heard the giants fall
In tales that turned the night to velvet dare.
Here, in this chair where now the ivy creeps,
She sang of Arthur’s stars and Lancelot’s tears—
O cruel decay, what profit do you reap
From stealing all that innocence endears?”
A glint beneath the rubble catches grace—
A locket, clasped by roots beneath the floor.
Its hinge resists, then yields to time’s embrace,
Revealing curls of chestnut, now no more.
Two faces, blurred yet bright as morning’s kiss:
A woman’s smile, a child with wooden sword.
The knight’s helm falls, his armor sundered by this
Small weight of love no battlefield could gore.
“I vowed to guard these borders with my blade,
To carve my name in valor’s bloody scroll—
What fool mistakes a hero’s gold brocade
For armor ’gainst the canker in the soul?
I sought the Grail in deserts none could chart,
Yet here it lay, in laughter’s quickened breath—
A chalice shattered by the exiled heart
That trades its home for glory’s gilded death.”
He staggers to the hill where once he dreamed,
Beneath the oak that nursed his childhood schemes.
Its branches, now a skeleton, still seem’d
To hum the lullabies of lost sunbeams.
There, where the village sprawled in life’s embrace,
He sees the truth no dawn can now revise—
Not razed by war, nor some divine disgrace,
But merely… faded, like the light in eyes.
The stars emerge—cold watchers of the deep—
As frost begins its slow, conspiratorial climb.
His breath, a silver wraith, still dares to keep
Vigil for ghosts that perished in their prime.
“If man is but a vessel for regret,”
He murmurs to the roots beneath his palm,
“Then let the earth reclaim this vain cadet
Whose glory was the pyre, his love the psalm.”
The armor, ice-clad in the moon’s pale stare,
Grows heavier than all of Albion’s shores.
He lays his sword beneath the oak’s bare glare,
Unclasps the locket where his heart yet pores.
“Take back your iron shell,” he tells the night,
“The knight expires where the boy remains.
No epitaph but this: he glimpsed the light
Too late to spare his soul its endless chains.”
Dawn finds him marble-frosted, eyes still fixed
Upon the valley where no smoke ascends.
The locket rests where two dead leaves are mixed—
A final pact between the buried friends.
And should some wanderer chance this spectral plain,
They’ll mark no noble deed, no battle’s cost,
Just armor filled with ivy’s green campaign
And dust that whispers, “All that’s loved is lost.”
