The Bridge of Rain and Regret

The rain, a tailor threading silver tears,
Embroiders shrouds upon the gnarled oaks,
While memory, a surgeon, splits the veil
To probe the wound no mortal hand evokes.
This specter wears a coat of tarnished brass,
Its buttons stamped with crests now swallowed by rust,
And in its breast, a pocket watch lies still—
A heart silenced by betrayal’s abrupt thrust.

Three winters past (or thirty? Truth dissolves
Like ink in storm), this figure marched with men
Whose laughter coiled like smoke above the tents,
Now phantoms gnawed by cannon-ripe terrain.
They called him Thomas—once. A name now drowned
Beneath the marsh of bureaucratic script,
A ledger’s entry smudged by rain and guilt,
Where friendship’s oath and duty’s blade had slipped.

*“Advance!”* the generals barked. The field, a maw
Of clotted earth, hungered for loyal bones.
He trod the gas-light swamp, his rifle cold,
While death, a harvester, sowed seeds in moans.
But lo—a flicker in the smog: a face,
A brother’s eyes, wide as the ceasefire’s hush,
Yet Thomas’ finger, trained on shadow’s creed,
Unleashed the shot that carved the fatal blush.

The corpse, unnamed, became a nation’s son,
A hero’s epitaph in polished verse,
While Thomas, cloaked in ribbons, bit his tongue—
A lie festering, silent as a hearse.
No soul discerned the tremor in his hand,
The way his breath would hitch at dusk’s first star,
For glory’s wine, once sipped, now curdled sour,
And ghosts don’t bleed beneath the surgeon’s scar.

Tonight, the bridge—his purgatory’s stage—
Receives a visitor: a woman, cloaked in black,
Her umbrella, a raven’s fractured wing,
Skims puddles where his hellish deeds refract.
Her face—a mirror of the fallen’s gaze—
Same curve of lip, same furrow grief had wrought.
*“Dear God,”* the spirit rasps, *“it is the sister
Whose letters I returned, marked *‘soldier, lost.’”*

She kneels, retrieves a locket from the mud,
Its hinge agape like jaws of some small beast,
And there, preserved, the photo of her kin—
The boy he slew, now frozen at his feast.
*“Why come you here?”* the specter longs to cry,
But breath, unbound from flesh, makes sound a myth.
She speaks instead, her voice a thread of smoke:
*“They said he died a patriot’s swift death.*

*Yet dreams… they peel the varnish from the tale.
I see him slump, not charging toward the sun,
But startled, crumbling like a wounded fawn—
A brother’s shot, not foeman’s, struck him down.”*
The rain applauds her words with grim assent.
The spirit’s hands (transparent, clawed) reach out
To brush her cheek—She shivers, blind, alone,
While he, the architect, dissolves in doubt.

A flash—the past unspools its gory reel:
The trench’s gut, the boy’s last gasp, *“Why… Tom?”*
The oath they swore as children, split in twain
By war’s deceit, now bleeds through time’s fragile dam.
He strains to mold the mist into a tongue,
To carve confession from the stagnant air,
But entropy, the jailer, chains his voice—
Truth stays entombed, a rot he cannot share.

She stands, the locket clenched, and turns to go,
Her silhouette a dagger in the gloom.
The bridge, a throat, swallows her fading form,
While Thomas howls the dirge of his own tomb.
The river, swollen, hums a lullaby,
Its depths a salve no penitent may know.
Two tragedies now knit their endless thread:
One died by fire, one by ice and snow.

Dawn licks the horizon, cowardly, subdued,
Exposing petals wilted on the banks—
Crimson poppies, drowned in yesterday’s flood,
Their faces bowed as if in eternal thanks.
The specter watches, fixed in sorrow’s vise,
As workers trudge across the ancient stone,
Their boots erasing prints left in the dark—
A world that spins, indifferent to his groan.

And so he waits, the bridge his only hearth,
Until her grief, perhaps, may loop like rain,
Returning with the storm to hear the truth
That might, in some far realm, unknot his chain.
But seasons churn; the oak leaves birth and fall,
Their corpses gold, then sallow, then decayed.
She never comes. The locket’s clasped elsewhere—
Beneath her pillow? Tossed to some cold glade?

The secret, petrified, becomes his spine,
A fossil where his mortal core once beat.
The bridge, now pockmarked with a thousand storms,
Still bears the weight of whispers none repeat.
And sometimes, when the rain descends in sheets,
A figure, faint, is glimpsed by drunkards’ eyes—
A man who strides the parapet, then fades,
His silence etched in midnight’s breathless sighs.

Thus ends the tale (or does it ever cease?),
A parable in water, flesh, and stone:
That war’s true toll is counted not in blood
But ghosts who walk, unloved, and alone.
Their shadows, cast by no celestial fire,
Drift through the realms where mercy’s gates rust shut.
Forgive them not, for they know what they’ve done—
The bridge, the rain, the soul… and the footfall’s cut.