The Artist’s Lament: Echoes in the Hollow Wood
A parchment slept, half-kissed by rot, in loam of whispered years—
Its edges curled like sorrow’s tongue, its ink a spectral bruise,
A testament to veins unbound, to salt of unshed tears.
The forest, cloaked in memory’s shroud, stretched limbs to clutch the sky,
Each knot a hollow eye that watched, each root a coiled lie.
Here wandered once a soul who bore the weight of colors drowned,
An artist’s hands, once quick with light, by silence shackled down.
His name, now moss, had trembled once on lips of courtly throngs,
But brushstrokes birthed from fevered depths were deemed the dirge of wrongs.
“Too dark,” they hissed, “too raw, too wild—these visions choke the air!”
And so they cast his heart’s own lexicon to thistle’s cold despair.
He fled to where the pines conversed in tongues of creaking lore,
To weave his grief in canvas shrouds on looms the tempests bore.
The wood, a gallery of ghosts, embraced his fractured art—
Each stroke a dirge, each hue a wound, each frame a splintered heart.
Years gnawed the world. The pines stood sentinel, their needles scribing time,
While men forgot the rebel hand that dared to paint the rime.
Yet deep within the thicket’s throat, where even owls feared tread,
A cottage slumped, its beams askew, a skull with vines for thread.
There, on a desk of blighted yew, the letter waited still,
Its seal a scar of crimson wax, its message poised to kill.
A wanderer, led by fate’s blind cur, now crossed the rotted sill—
And in the gloom, with trembling breath, breached truth the stars would spill.
“*To you, who carved your judgments deep in flesh of my renown,
Who crowned my brows with thorns of ‘friend,’ then plucked the laurels down—
Know this: your voice, which praised my dawn, then damned my twilight’s blaze,
Has fed these oaks with whispers thick, and choked my final days.
You swore my art would outlive breath, would blaze in history’s keep,
Yet when the critics’ hounds drew near, you let the harvest reap.
My gallery of shattered dreams, you dubbed a madman’s maze—
And sold my soul for patron’s gold, then drowned in hollow praise.*
*The woods, at least, do not pretend to love what they consume.
Their maws are frank in hunger’s song, their cruelty sans perfume.
Here, roots will drink my essence slow, and wind chant lullabies,
While you, who nursed the viper’s tooth, will meet your own demise.*”
The wanderer, now pale as moth, let fall the vengeful sheet.
The cottage sighed. A palette rotted, choked in colors obsolete—
A smear of umber (tear-stained cheek?), a storm of cobalt (night?),
A crimson streak, like life’s last thread, unraveled into blight.
Outside, the trees began to hum a dirge in minor key,
Their branches tracing arabesques of grim mortality.
And there, between the birches’ ribs, a shade in tattered cloak
Swung gentle as a pendulum—no, not a shade… but smoke.
The rope, though frayed by decades’ grime, still bit the throat of air,
A pendulum that marked the hours of grief too vast to bear.
The artist’s frame, now bone and dust, swayed with the forest’s breath,
His final gallery the storm, his requiem—slow death.
The wanderer fled, the letter clutched like sin against his chest,
But words have roots, and roots have tongues, and tongues deny him rest.
For every step, the oaks replied with whispers from the page—
“*Betrayal’s ink is evergreen; it blights from age to age.*”
Now travelers who dare the wood at waning of the moon
Report a shape that paints the mist with nocturnes of the womb—
A specter with a brush of ash, a palette forged from sighs,
Who etches truths on bark and stone, then burns them for the skies.
And sometimes, when the rain descends in needles sharp as rue,
The pines disgorge a yellowed scrap, a relic soaked in blue—
A fragment of that damning script, half-eaten by the years,
Which reads, “*All art is betrayal’s cost, paid in the artist’s tears.*”
The oaks, they nod. The moss, it drinks. The shadows keep their vault.
The letter’s truth, now fungus-ripe, still seeds its bitter salt.
And mankind, ever armed with scorn for hearts that dare too much,
Walks on, while deep in rotted loam, the betrayed outlive the clutch.
So ends the tale—or thus it seems. But in the gloam’s embrace,
Where daylight fears to pry, a hand etches a spectral trace.
The artist’s ghost, in silent throes, still wields his brush of air,
And paints his traitor’s face anew… on every leaf that’s there.
