The Orphan’s Lament: A Cathedral’s Silent Echo
Where shadows cling like whispers of the past,
A boy, whose name no living soul recalls,
Ascends the steps where muted twilight falls.
His eyes, twin pools of sorrow’s endless night,
Seek truths obscured by veils of frail starlight.
The cathedral’s breath, a murmur through the stone,
Echoes a vow no flesh nor blood hath known.
Three winters prior, beneath a splintered moon,
A mother’s voice had hummed a fading tune.
“When autumn’s gold shall crown the oaks anew,
I’ll return, my child, with dawn’s first dew.”
But autumns three have wept their russet tears,
And still she wanders not this realm of fears.
Her promise hangs, a phantom in the air,
A brittle leaf ensnared in love’s despair.
He treads the nave where dust performs its dance,
Each step a dirge, each breath a fleeting chance
To glimpse her face within the stained glass glow,
Where saints and angels guard the tales below.
A figure carved in jade and crimson light
Mimics her smile, yet chills his aching sight.
“Oh, speak!” he pleads to shadows’ mute reply,
“Where does she linger, ’neath what alien sky?”
The altar looms, a monolith of dread,
Its ivory pallor mocking hopes long dead.
A chalice gleams, a relic of despair,
Its golden rim unkissed by lips of prayer.
Here, on these stones, she knelt in fervent guise,
Her whispered prayers ascending to the skies.
“Why, Mother, did you pledge what fate denied?
Why leave my heart to starve in endless pride?”
A rustle stirs—not wind, nor mortal sigh,
But Memory’s ghost, draped in a tattered sky.
Her form, a wisp of smoke and moonbeam spun,
Floats toward the boy, whose trembling fingers run
Through vacant air. “Dear heart,” she breathes, “forgive.
The vow I made was not for earth to live.
Beyond the veil where mortal bonds unbind,
I wait—yet you, my love, must stay behind.”
He clutches at the specter’s fading frame,
His cries dissolving in the dark’s cold claim.
“Take me! The world is but a crypt of lies!”
Her touch, a frost, ethereal, denies.
“The living may not tread the paths I roam.
But dream, my child, and I shall guide you home.”
She melts like mist beneath the moon’s pale stare,
Leaving him lone in silence’s crushing lair.
Dawn’s fingers claw the eastern skies apart,
Yet light finds no dominion in his heart.
The bells toll once, a hollow, dirge-like knell,
As down his cheeks unheeded teardrops fell.
The cathedral stands, a sentinel of woe,
Its spires piercing heavens he may not know.
And there, beneath the rose window’s dim gaze,
The boy dissolves to ash, erased by days.
No marker bears his name, no dirge is sung,
For dreams and dust are kin when both are young.
The winds, through arches, chant their old refrain:
“All promises are phantoms born of pain.”
Yet in the gloom where hope and truth divide,
A mother’s ghost still whispers, “Wait, abide…”
But stone and silence hold their counsel deep,
And where he wept, the shadows never sleep.
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