The Ballad of Weeping Hollow
There lies a hamlet cursed by whispered years—
Weeping Hollow, where the aspen trees grow bent
As if to kiss the graves that crowd its tears.
No lark dares sing above its moldered eaves,
For silence there becomes a living shroud
That smothers even Time’s relentless leaves
Beneath the weight of sorrow’s brooding cloud.
And in this place, where twilight never dies,
There dwelled a soul the villagers named Grey—
A woman wrought of storm and starlit eyes,
Whose hands could coax dead gardens into May.
Yet through her veins ran frost no sun could thaw;
Her laughter, rare as roses in the snow,
Would falter when the wind bore ancient law
From yonder hill where blackened elms bow low.
They say she came when autumn’s throat was slit,
A wraith-child trailing rags and rattled bones,
Found wailing by the brook where moonlight split
On waters choked with leaves and hollow moans.
Old Martha took her in (though crossed her breast)
And raised her ‘mid the looms and candle-drip,
But saw the girl’s strange sorrows manifest
Like cracks in porcelain bound to lose its grip.
Grey learned the language of unspoken things—
The way the hearth-smoke coiled when death drew near,
How clocks would choke their chimes at midnight’s sting,
And shadows pooled where grief had shed a tear.
At twenty springs, her hair outshone the wheat,
Yet suitors’ hands turned cold ere they could plead—
For in her gaze, too sharp and sweetly fleet,
Lay centuries of secrets none could read.
One eve, as bonfires gnawed the harvest’s end,
A stranger came with eyes like tarnished brass
Whose cart bore chests of velvet without mend
And perfumes thick as guilt. “Good folk, I pass
To sell rare cures,” he cried, “for festered hearts!”
The crowd recoiled—his tongue too honeyed shone—
Yet Grey stood fixed, her pale face counterpart
To his dark grin. “What poison have you known?”
He slid a vial—glass kissed by midnight’s blue—
Into her palm. “For memories that swarm
Like wasps in walls. Drink when the moon rings true,
And see what chains your soul to this false form.”
She paid with pearls torn from her mother’s grave
(Old Martha slept where willows wept their roots)
And fled to caves where river echoes rave,
To sip the draught that bore forbidden fruits.
Oh, what visions tore the veil of present pain!
A castle’s spire, clawing at the dawn—
A babe’s first cry cut short by bloodstained rain—
A lord’s cold blade that left her soul unborn.
She saw it all—the truth behind her birth—
Born noble, tossed to peasants by disgrace
Lest scandal mar his house’s pompous worth.
Her mother’s ghost still wore that pleading face…
At daybreak, madness rode her gasping breath.
She stormed the manor on the eastern rise
Where ivy strangled stones that mocked her wrath,
And screamed her lineage to the cloudless skies.
The steward laughed—a rasp of rusted gears—
“The master’s bones have fed these walls twelve years.
Your proof’s as dead as debts the wind erases.
Be gone, mad wench, and haunt some other traces.”
They found her by the bridge at eventide,
Her fingers threading currents’ silver hair,
Singing a lullaby the drowned oft chide
When mourning doves cast feathers through the air.
No tear escaped her—grief had burned too deep—
She carved her childhood name into the bark
Of the lone oak that guards where memories sleep,
Then let the river guide her into dark.
Now travelers swear, when fog embalms the shore,
A woman’s voice entwines with the loch’s sigh—
Not mournful, but resolved forevermore
To ask the stars why truth must first deny.
The vial’s last drops gleam in midnight’s palm,
The elm’s carved scar outlives the flesh it marred,
And Weeping Hollow keeps its falsehood calm
Beneath the weight of choices petrified.
Thus ends the tale of she who walked two worlds—
The castoff heir to sorrows not her own—
Whose heart, once split, revealed the storm that curled
Around a life the fates had overthrown.
No stone bears Grey’s true name in lichened script,
No dirge recalls the tempests she endured.
The Hollow’s silence, thick and ever-equipped,
Becomes her elegy—absurd, obscured.
