The Artist’s Lament: A Dirge in the Secret Garden
Where shadows weave their tapestries of dread,
There lies a garden veiled in ashen mist—
A sanctuary where love’s frail roots once spread.
No mortal eye, save one, hath glimpsed its bowers,
Where lilies weep their nectar to the stones,
And roses blanch beneath the weight of hours,
Their petals trembling like forsaken bones.
Here walked the artist, gaunt with silent fires,
His palette drained to hues of bruised despair,
Who sought refuge from scornful crowds’ desires,
To mend his soul in fragrant, cloistered air.
The thorns, like guardians of some hallowed crypt,
Parted for him alone—their spines withdrew—
And there, amidst the twilight’s dying script,
He glimpsed the form that mortal never knew.
A figure wrought from starlight’s faintest breath,
Her voice a hymn that hushed the nightingale,
Her presence spun from life and death’s duet,
A fleeting dream no earthly hands could hail.
“What wraith,” he cried, “doth haunt this dim repose?
What spirit walks where time itself is bound?”
But she, with eyes like violets drenched in snows,
Turned not to flesh, nor touched the hallowed ground.
“I am the echo of what thou hast lost,”
She whispered, veiled in jasmine’s sweet decay,
“The muse thy brush hath yearned to clutch at cost,
Yet flees thy grasp like dawn’s dissolving gray.
This garden is thy heart’s own fractured chart—
Each blossom born of hope, each thorn of pain.
I am the phantom of thy orphaned art,
The love that blooms, yet withers in thy brain.”
He reached—his fingers brushed the empty chill,
While tears, like molten silver, scarred his cheek.
“If thou art shadow, let me drink my fill
Of dreams, and paint what mortal tongues dare speak!
Stay! Let my canvas bind thee to the earth,
That I may freeze this twilight’s fleeting grace!”
But specters mock the hubris of man’s worth—
She faded, leaving but her phantom trace.
Yet dawn by dawn, he toiled with desperate hands,
To trap her essence ‘midst his pigments’ strife,
But ochre cracked, and azure turned to sands,
As though the hues rebelled to cage her life.
The garden watched—its boughs in sorrow bent—
Each stroke a dirge, each shade a wail suppressed,
While she, a sigh through wilting lilacs sent,
Became both tempest and the storm’s arrest.
“Why dost thou flee the art that seeks thy name?”
He mourned, his brow a map of furrowed night.
“Thy face, a flame that dies within the frame,
Thy voice, a chord no melody may write!”
Her answer rustled through the cypress choir:
“Thy love is but the brush’s lonely kiss—
To render me in blood or ink or fire
Is to unmake the veil of boundless bliss.”
Still, fevered, he pursued her ghostly trail,
Through groves where marigold and rue entwined,
Past fountains choked with tears no sun could pale,
To cliffs where even stars grew sick and blind.
There, at the garden’s edge—a gulf profound—
She stood, her form dissolving into air,
And whispered, “Cross not where no soul is bound,
Lest thou wouldst tread the void that lovers share.”
But mad with grief, he leapt—the chasm yawned—
And caught her not, but plummeted alone
Through realms where light and darkness, newly spawned,
Devoured the seeds of flesh and heart and bone.
The garden, shrieking, shed its last cascade—
The roses crumbled into ashen rain,
The streams ran black where once pure sapphires played,
And silence drowned the echoes of his pain.
Now travellers, lost ‘neath the moon’s cold stare,
Speak of a grove where specters clutch their breasts,
And canvases, half-formed, still haunt the air,
While lilies chant the dirge of love’s bequests.
But none dare linger where such sorrow breeds—
Where beauty’s corpse lies wrapped in thorny chains—
Lest they, too, sow their hearts as poison seeds
In gardens where the artist’s soul remains.
