Farewell’s Frozen Whisper: A Lament Upon the Snowbound Peaks
A solitary spirit treads the snow, where childhood’s whispers blend
With winds that moan through pines, their branches bent by time’s regret,
To seek the star that once did promise what the heart forgets.
O mount of marble silence, cloaked in crystalline despair,
Thy slopes, like memories half-veiled, breathe frost upon the air.
Here, footsteps etched in tender youth—now phantom-traced and pale—
Return to trace the shadowed paths where joy and sorrow wail.
“Behold,” the north wind murmurs, “here thy fragile laughter played,
When life was but a sapphire stream through sunlit vales conveyed.
Thy hands, ungloved and guileless, shaped the snow to angels fair,
While hope, a lark ascending, trilled its hymn against despair.”
Yet lo! What spectral visage dawns where drifts in moonwash gleam?
A boy—nay, memory’s mirage—adrift in silvered steam.
His cheeks, by boreal roses kissed; his eyes, two stars ensnared;
His voice, the brooklet’s vanished song through rime-clad thickets aired.
“Dear shade,” the wandering soul intones, “whose smile still haunts this height,
Dost thou recall our pact sworn ‘neath the comet’s fleeting light?
We clasped our palms o’er snowflakes vowed to meet when years had spun—
But seasons, traitors to their oath, claimed thee ere they were done.”
The phantom lifts a hand of mist where snowflakes dance and twirl,
His lips, a breath on vitreous air, unfurl a vanished world:
“See’st yonder crag where avalanche, with white and wrathful roar,
Did rend our twilight’s golden thread? I wait here evermore.
Thy mittened hand slipped cold from mine; thy cries the storm devoured.
They dug seven days—thy mother’s wail the eighth hour’s shower.
Yet I, by frost preserved, remain where mortal bonds untie—
A sentinel of farewells beneath the star-strewn sky.”
Now tears, like pearls from Lethe’s stream, down agèd cheeks decline,
To freeze as pendants, bitter-bright, on night’s obsidian shrine.
“O brother-lost! O twin-born spark cleft by the avalanche’s blade!
Why linger here in endless snow, a ghost by grief betrayed?”
“Because,” the wraith replies, “love’s lexicon outwrites the tomb.
Each flake that falls revives our dawn, each star rebukes the gloom.
Thy grief, a sculptor’s chisel, keeps my form from fading dim—
To leave this mount were to forsake the light I breathed through him.”
They stand as statues hewn from ache, while constellations wheel—
Orion’s belt, Diana’s bow, mute witnesses to steel
That pierces hearts which beat no more, yet bleed eternal tides.
The living grasps the phantom’s wrist—where frost and pulse collide.
“Enough!” the wanderer weeps, “this dream-fed torment must conclude.
The child I was lies buried here in glacial solitude.
Come, walk with me beyond the ridge where dawn’s first blush may heal—”
But snowflakes spiral through his grasp, the specter’s essence frail.
“Farewell,” the boy’s voice fades, “my anchor to this mortal sphere.
Thy footsteps, westward-bound, shall be the requiem I hear.
When winter’s gale through fissures howls, know ’tis my lullaby—
Sleep, brother-mine, in peace; our star now drinks the morning’s dye.”
Alone, the soul ascends the pass where glaciers weep slow tears,
Each breath a plume of transient fire against the crushing years.
Below, the valley spreads its arms, a sepulcher of white;
Above, the star—once beacon-bright—dissolves in vacant light.
So ends the tale the mountains tell when blizzards hold their breath—
Of love that clasped death’s frigid hand to cheat oblivion’s theft.
But wanderers who brave the heights at twilight’s fragile hour
May hear twin laughter on the wind… then glimpse a fading flower—
A snowdrop, crushed beneath the boot of time’s unheeding tread,
Its petals imprinted with the shapes of joy long fled.
And high, where ice and firmament in cold communion blend,
Two shadows merge beneath a star that will not condescend.
