The Artist’s Requiem in Ruined Stone
A crumbling city breathes its final sigh—
Its towers, skeletal, claw the ashen skies,
While ivy-choked alleys whisper ancient lies.
Here, where the shadows coil like serpents cold,
An artist treads, his heart both fierce and old,
His hands, once deft, now tremble, gaunt and bare,
To sculpt the phantoms haunting stifled air.
No laurels crown his brow, nor gold his palm,
The world, blind judge, hath met his art with calm
Indifference—a wound that gnaws his soul.
Yet still he seeks the muse to make him whole,
To carve from silence truths the crowd denies,
And give the stone a voice that never dies.
Through archways cracked, where time’s cruel teeth have fed,
He follows whispers of the spectral dead—
A rumor spun from ash and desperate hope:
A chapel, lost, where fractured saints elope
With moonlight, dancing on a fallen spire.
There, ‘neath the rubble, burns eternal fire,
A forge of visions, locked in earth’s embrace,
Where art and shadow merge in sacred space.
Three nights he roams, his lantern’s frail decree
A flickering ward ‘gainst dread’s taut tyranny,
Till, on the fourth, the ruins shift and yield—
A portal yawns within a broken field.
Descending, step by step, to depths unknown,
He finds a vault where neither time hath flown
Nor light transgressed—a sanctum, still, austere,
Its walls adorned with tales of mortal fear.
A gallery of frescoes, grim, divine,
Unfurls: a chronicle of slow decline.
Here, kings with hollow eyes clutch rusted thrones;
There, mothers weep o’er babes reduced to bones.
But central, vast, a masterwork unfolds—
A sculptor, lone, whose chisel strikes the molds
Of human forms, their faces twisted, pained,
As if the stone itself their grief retained.
The artist stares—his own face, gaunt, betrayed,
Looks back, though centuries have bowed and frayed
The pigments. “Mirror of my soul,” he breathes,
“What specter through the veil of time now seethes?
Why binds thy fate to mine, twin flame, twin woe?”
The fresco shudders; dust begins to flow
Like tears, and from the wall, a voice, austere:
“We are the keepers of the unnumbered year,
Condemned to seek what mortal hands cannot—
To chain the infinite in structured thought.
“Each age doth birth a vessel for this curse,
To hunger, starve, yet ne’er quench the thirst
For beauty’s fire. Our works, though praised, though mourned,
Are but pale shades of truths we’ve glimpsed and scorned.
Go—free thyself! Let ruin claim thy blade,
Lest thou, like me, become this vault’s grim shade.”
The artist steps back, trembling, yet compelled,
His soul a storm where pride and terror meld.
“No specter’s counsel stays my destined course—
If madness be the wellspring of true force,
Then let me drink, though all the world deride!”
He lifts his chisel, strikes the fresco’s side—
A crack resounds, a thunder-clap of fate,
And through the breach, a light beyond the weight
Of suns pours forth. There, in the radiant mist,
A figure forms: a woman, sculptor’s tryst,
Her form hewn not of flesh, but living stone,
Her eyes twin voids where galaxies have flown.
“Thou hast unsealed the gate,” her voice doth toll,
“And glimpsed the price of mastering the whole.
To wield this power, thy mortal shell must fade—
Eternal art demands eternal shade.
Choose now: the world’s brief praise, or timeless might,
To dwell in men’s dreams, or the void of night.”
No pause, no breath—he clasps her stony wrist.
“I choose the fire, though I become the mist,
Though none remain to chant my name in prayer,
If but my vision conquers mortal air!”
Her laugh, a chime of tombs, engulfs the room—
The vault dissolves. Outside, the crack of doom
Rends sky and earth. The city, stone by stone,
Collapses, as his flesh is turned to bone,
To marble, cold, that climbs from feet to breast.
Yet still he carves, though death invades his chest,
His chisel flashing in the chaos’ glow—
A final form, a man consumed by snow,
Reaching for stars that mock with icy fire.
The final stroke… a sigh… the chisel’s choir
Falls still. Where once the artist fought and bled,
A statue stands, its eyes twin pits of dread,
One hand outstretched, as if to snatch the sun,
The other clenched, where all his hopes lie spun
To dust. Around him, silence claims the land,
The ruins, now a tomb none understand.
And when, by chance, some wanderer, lost, forlorn,
Stumbles upon this monument of scorn,
They’ll pause, perhaps, and feel a phantom ache—
A kinship with the thirst they cannot slake—
Then turn away, as all before have turned,
While deep in stone, the artist’s spirit yearned,
Immortal, yes, yet prisoner of his creed,
A king of shadows, crowned by his own need.
Thus ends the tale of hands that sought the flame
And found, in glory’s grasp, a darker name—
For art, when stripped of love’s redeeming breath,
Becomes a mirror to the artist’s death.
