The Watcher at the Closed Shutters
Beneath the weight of centuries long passed,
There stands a figure pale, forever bowed,
Obsessed with moments framed yet never clasped.
The manor’s eyes, its shuttered gaze so tight,
Conceal the secrets kept from mortal sight.
He is the Watcher—silent in his wait,
Of hours sunk beneath the tide’s cruel flow;
A sentinel who senses but too late
The fleeting dance of joy and deepened woe.
With hands that clasp the air, and sight so keen,
He haunts the space where life once danced between.
No light from sun may pierce those wooden veils,
No whisper stir the stillness in the room,
Yet in his mind’s eye, fragile memory sails,
Through vaults of dusk, through corridors of gloom.
Each shuttered pane a mirror to the past,
Reflecting phantoms doomed forever fast.
His heart, a vessel cracked by time’s cruel grip,
Remembers laughter caught in ambered days,
The scent of autumn leaves on cooling lips,
The tender glance beneath the fading rays.
Yet all these echoes like a dream dissolve—
The pages worn that fate refuses solve.
The manor’s bones, like ancient ribs, enfold
The fading ghosts of lives once brightly spun.
Its timbers whisper secrets dark and cold
Of vanished suns and races long outrun.
The Watcher knows this silence is his chain,
A prison forged by nostalgia’s reign.
The passing hours are waves that roll and break,
Eroding shores of hope and mortal breath.
He drains the cups of joy that days forsake,
While shadows creep to claim his soul’s bequeath.
No voice may comfort him, nor footsteps call,
Save for the endless ticking’s bitter thrall.
He speaks, but words are whispers lost to air,
His monologue a thread betrayed by time.
“Why does the present fade to thin despair,
While yesteryears enact their endless rhyme?
Is life but dust that slips through eager hands,
A tale inscribed on ever-shifting sands?”
Within his breast, a torrent vast and wild,
Of memory’s flood with sorrow deeply sown.
The innocence of yore—forever exiled—
Draws forth a moan in anguished undertone.
“Oh, could I seize the fugitive day’s delight,
And hold the sun that fades into the night!”
Yet still the manor sleeps beneath the stars,
Its shuttered eyes unblinking evermore.
The Watcher’s gaze, like prison’s coldest bars,
Beholds the dark where vanished dreams explore.
He is the keeper of what cannot stay,
A wraith who lingers when the light gives way.
The dawn arrives, a specter pale and slow,
It sheds no warmth upon the shuttered frame.
He breathes the chill where only ghosts may go,
His whispered name forgotten, lost to blame.
The dawn reveals the timeless, sad decree:
That all must fade — as all did cease to be.
No hand will lift the bolts of time’s retreat,
No voice will call him from his hollow watch.
He stands alone where heart and silence meet,
A relic bound within the manor’s clutch.
The past must sleep forever locked and barred—
And he, its prisoner, broken and scarred.
In twilight’s hush, the evening star descends,
A cold companion to his quiet pain.
The manor breathes, and with it, slowly bends
Beneath the weight of memory’s cruel chain.
The Watcher fades, a shadow lost to time,
A lonely echo in a mournful rhyme.
His story drifts upon the autumn wind,
A mournful hymn the withered leaves intone.
The fleeting hours—like strangers—start to bend,
And leave him there, forsaken and alone.
Such is the fate where man’s condition lies:
A spectral dance beneath unyielding skies.
So hear the tale from fenestral gloom,
Where shuttered hours are keepers of the past.
Within the silence of that dim-lit room,
The Watcher’s heart beats faint and beats its last.
No dawn can break this melancholy gloom—
The shuttered man remains within the tomb.
