The Artist’s Lament: Echoes in the Ruined Keep

The artist comes, his heart a storm of years,
To seek the whispers of his vanished youth,
Where memory’s prism fractures into tears,
And hope’s frail petals yield to bitter truth.
The gate, once gold, now gnawed by rust’s dull tooth,
Creaks like a dirge to greet his trembling hand—
A requiem for dreams turned shifting sand.

“O crumbling sentinel of buried days,”
He murmurs, tracing cracks where frescoes bled,
“Thy halls once bore the sun’s meridian blaze,
Yet now house only echoes of the dead.
Here, where my father’s brush in fervor sped
To paint these walls with myths of gods and skies,
I trace the ghosts of hues that dared not rise.”

A moth-eaten tapestry stirs in the gloom,
Its threads unraveling a sylvan scene—
A boy who knelt in some forgotten room,
His hands outstretched to catch the light’s last gleam.
“Ah, mock me not!” he cries, his voice unclean
With anguish. “Once, these stones knew love’s sweet tune,
Now naught remains but ash and waning moon.”

Through corridors where dust performs its ballet,
He stumbles, clutching at the phantom air,
As though the past might rupture through the gray
And grant one moment’s respite from despair.
A door, warped shut by decades’ grim repair,
Resists—then yields with one tormented groan,
Revealing chambers where his soul was sown.

The nursery, a carcass stripped of song,
Its cradle cracked, its mobiles strung with mold.
Here, mother’s lullabies once soft and long
Now mingle with the rats’ relentless scold.
A toy horse, mane devoured, legs unrolled,
Lies crippled where his childhood tears were shed—
A steed that once rode galaxies ahead.

“O Time, thou art a thief in gilded guise!”
He weeps, collapsing on the rotted floor.
“Why spare these fragments to my starving eyes,
If all they breed is hunger’s ceaseless roar?
Here, joy was caged, yet clamored to soar—
A fledgling crushed beneath paternal will,
Whose love was law, whose ‘no’ could choke and kill.”

For in this keep, a father’s iron hand
Had forged both art and anguish in one breath,
Commanding beauty at his sole command,
Yet chilling with the frost of hinted death.
“Paint not the stars,” he’d sneered, “but mimic breath—
The mortal coil, the flesh, the finite clay!
What use are dreams that dusk will sweep away?”

The boy, now specter, strokes a splintered frame
That once enshrined a portrait, stark and bold—
A kingly figure robed in pride and shame,
Whose eyes still pierce the dark with judgment cold.
“You feared the flight of myths I dared to hold,
Yet bound me here to rot with your disdain.
Behold your legacy: a house of pain!”

A flash—then rain descends in silver spears,
Its rhythm drumming dirges on the stones.
The artist grasps a brush, dried hard with years,
And dips its bristles in the midnight’s moans.
“If life denies, let memory atone,”
He rasps, and sweeps the wall in frenzied arcs,
A Sisyphus of light in endless dark.

But lo! As pigment kisses ancient plaster,
A miracle unfolds beneath his touch—
The room exhales the fragrance of blushed aster,
The hearth ignites, though no flame burns as such.
A boy’s faint laughter, tender, echoes much
Too real—he spins, and there, in transient grace,
His mother’s smile illuminates the space.

“Stay!” he implores, but phantoms fade like mist,
Leaving him clawing at the void’s cruel breast.
The walls resume their decay’s bitter tryst,
The fleeting vision murdered by unrest.
“So this is hell,” he sighs, his soul undressed,
“To glimpse the garden through the prison’s bars,
Then feel the dark reclaim its choking stars.”

He staggers to the tower, wind’s high throne,
Where once he’d charted comets’ wild crusades.
The steps, though rotten, bear his weight alone—
A pilgrimage to selfhood’s lost parades.
The rooftop gapes, a maw where moonlight fades,
And there, beneath the constellations’ stare,
He pours his voice into the boundless air:

“O silent witnesses of mortal schemes,
Who burn untouched by time’s voracious flood,
Did you not blaze above my boyish dreams
When all below was tempest, blood, and mud?
Then take me back! Let veins run rich with bud
Of youth’s red wine—or else, in mercy, rend
This veil of hours that binds me to this end!”

The stars, as ever, keep their counsel close,
Their light a cold reproach to human cries.
The wind, now bristling with December’s throes,
Whips through his hair and scars his upturned eyes.
“So be it,” whispers he, “the old pact dies.
If forward’s death and backward’s but a lie,
I’ll carve my finale in this broken sky.”

One step—the edge—a breath that hangs in time—
Then gravity enacts its ancient role.
The courtyard, rising with a rhythm prime,
Embraces him where shattered dreams unroll.
And in that flight, he glimpses, body-whole,
The child who’d laughed, the father’s grudging praise,
The brushstrokes of a life lost in the maze.

Dawn finds him there, a masterpiece of woe,
His blood the final pigment on the stones.
The castle, keeper of all none may know,
Guards secrets in its ever-deepening moans.
And somewhere, in the realm where silence groans,
A boy still kneels, his hands cupped for the light—
Forever chasing stars that fled the night.