The Ashen Epistle
its spires like broken fingers clawing at the starless sky.
Here, where shadows hum the hymns of what was lost,
a boy with eyes of ember treads the rubble, half a ghost.
His name, a whisper swallowed by the wind; his feet,
bare as the truth he seeks, trace paths where cobblestones once slept.
The orphan of the ashes knows the weight of vacant halls,
the hollow ache of questions hung like curtains on these walls.
One dusk, as autumn gnawed the edges of the world,
he found it—nestled in the ribs of a clockwork bird,
its wings ossified by time, its heart a locket cold—
a letter, sealed with wax the hue of blood grown old.
*“To the child who walks the labyrinth of my undone years,*
*I write this in the language of the rain, the code of tears.
The city’s pulse was silenced not by sword, nor flame, nor flood,
but by the price we paid to taste the fruit called Freedom’s Bud.
They promised us the sky would kneel, that chains would melt like snow,
yet what sprouted from our yearning was a root no light could grow.
We razed the altars of the past to forge a nameless dawn,
but freedom, child, is but a cage whose bars are made of bone.
Seek not the tower where the sirens sang their twisted hymns,
nor the well where dreams descend to drown in silence grim.
The truth you crave lies buried where the river weeps at night,
in the grove of fallen angels, veiled from mortal sight.”*
The orphan’s breath unspooled the map etched in his mother’s hand—
through alleys where the faceless dead rise thick as shifting sand,
past the bridge where hope was bartered for a liar’s hollow creed,
to the grove, its trees like sentinels guarding graves of seed.
There, beneath a oak that wept its leaves in copper streams,
he dug until the earth surrendered what it dared not keep:
a box of rusted iron, clasped with thorns and twilight’s thread,
inside, a mirror cracked—his face, and hers, both crowned with dread.
Her voice leapt from the glass, a specter wreathed in rue:
*“We sold our souls to break the chains, yet forged a tighter noose.
Freedom, love, is not a thing to seize with reckless hands,
but a bird that perches softly where the heart understands.
Run, my son, before the city’s hunger eats your light—*
*its freedom is a fever, and its truth, a parasite.”*
But the boy, too long a pilgrim in the shrine of scars,
clutched the mirror to his chest and kissed its jagged stars.
Dawn bled across the ruins, gilding shadows into lies,
as the orphan, crowned in shards, met the sun with open eyes.
The grove inhaled—and with one breath, dissolved him into air,
leaving but the locket, empty, and the wind’s unanswered prayer.
Now travelers swear they hear him in the murmur of the stones,
a voice that hums the anthem of the freedom he chose.
And the city, ever-ravenous, gnaws its ancient pain,
while the Bud of Truth lies buried, waiting for the rain.
—
This poem weaves a haunting tapestry of loss and revelation, anchored in the orphan’s tragic pursuit of an elusive ideal. The imagery of the decaying city and the spectral letter creates a visceral atmosphere, while the mother’s warning and the boy’s fatal resolve evoke classical tragedy. The closing lines underscore the cyclical nature of longing, leaving the reader to ponder freedom’s paradox—the cost of its pursuit, and the silence it leaves behind.
