The Crumbling Vows of Yesteryear

Her name, a dirge the wind intones through rusted gates,
“Elara,” sighs the dust, “whose heart the Fates despoil,”
Her eyes, twin pools where starless midnight congregates,
Reflect the hollow arches of her spirit’s toil.
Upon her palm, a locket cold as winter’s kiss,
Its hinge outlives the hands that forged its silver tryst,
Within, a curl of hair – night’s raven-winged hue –
And words engraven: “Ere the solstice, I return to you.”

Three times had autumn bled the maples raw and thin,
Three times the frost had carved its epitaphs in stone,
Since through these very squares, midst cheers that shook the din,
He rode – her lionheart – to claim some foreign throne.
“Wait for me where sundial’s shadow kisses noon,
Beneath the clocktower’s chime, beneath the harvest moon,
Should war’s tempestuous wings eclipse the sun’s domain,
Still keep our rendezvous – in joy, or else in pain.”

She kept the vigil, though the plague-racked years conspired,
To sunder mortar, spirit, memory, and name,
When famine’s breath extinguished every household fire,
And mothers sold their tears to purchase bread and shame.
The clocktower, now a ribcage open to the skies,
Its hands forever frozen at the hour of goodbyes,
Still crowns the square where weekly she renews her oath,
Clad in the tattered grey of hope’s abandoned growth.

Tonight, the air hangs thick with presage yet unspoke,
The moon, a cataract-blind eye in heaven’s face,
Elara feels the weight of decades’ yoke invoke
A trembling in the earth, a shift in time and space.
From out the crumbled well – dry throat of ancient woes –
There coils a mist that human form and gesture shows,
Its voice the creak of doors in long-abandoned halls,
“Come, trace the path where buried truth your name recalls.”

Through arches where the ivy strangles saints of stone,
Past altars where the rats hold court in splintered pews,
The phantom leads her where the river’s sins have flown,
To gardens long entombed beneath the swamp’s green hues.
There, ’midst the reeds, a marble hand breaks earth’s embrace,
Its finger pointing northward with accusatory grace,
And in the mud below, half-sunk, a soldier’s chest,
Its iron belly cradling a parchment, addressed:

“To she who keeps the flame when all my stars grow pale,
If this finds not my bones, let ink my soul convey,
The battlements of Cyrrhus held beneath hell’s hail,
Yet not the sword, but treason stole my life away.
My brother, he whose milk I shared at mother’s breast,
Did sell our post’s weak flank to fill his coffers’ quest,
Thus when you read this missive sealed with blood and shame,
Know I died whispering your name, again, again.”

The parchment crumbles like the ash of funeral pyres,
Elara’s knees embrace the earth’s unfeeling chill,
Her wail unstitches silence – thread of silver wires –
While in the marsh, pale lights perform their ghostly drill.
The specter speaks anew, its timbre now less strange,
“Each dawn you’ve mourned at time’s immutable grange,
Yet he who pledged return now sleeps ’neath foreign loam,
Your grief the only seed in this desolate home.”

She stumbles through the necropolis they called a town,
Past market-stalls where phantoms hawk their spectral wares,
The locket clenched till blood adorns her wedding gown,
Her hair, a silver banner in the nightmare’s airs.
At last, the sundial – tilted gnomon cracked and scarred –
Receives her as the east bleeds dawn’s first crimson shard,
She lies where shadowed numerals once marked love’s hour,
Her fingers trace the words carved in the broken tower.

“Here ends the chronicle of hearts that dared to beat,
In rhythm with a promise time could not complete,”
The city breathes its requiem through crumbling walls,
As morning pales the stars where lonely nightfall crawls.
They find her at high noon, when light reveals truth’s cost,
Her face, a porcelain mask of serenity lost,
The locket open, hair entwined with hers – a swirl –
Two skeletons embraced beneath the mocking pearl.

Thus stands the city, pedagogue of mortal vows,
Where every crumbling brick whispers “Remember this,”
The wind through broken arches asks “Whence fidelity ploughs
Its furrow in the soul?” The stones reply with hiss.
Go, traveler, and bear this tale in memory’s keep –
Love’s edifice, once shattered, never wakes from sleep,
And promises, like ruins, wear time’s cruelest crown,
Their beauty most transcendent as they crumble down.