The Bridge of Rain and Remembering
where shadows knit their gauze of whispered gray,
a figure treads—no footfall, yet the march
of centuries hums faint in its delay.
The rain, a silver-threaded penitent,
weeps through the cobwebbed stones, each droplet’s chime
a dirge for names that time has long unpenned.
Here, the air is thick with orphaned rhyme.
*“What binds the soul that walks without a name?”*
it asks the mist, which parts but does not answer.
The bridge, a skeletal and sullen frame,
stretches its spine above the river’s cancer—
black water gnawing silt with restless jaws,
a liquid grave for memory’s debris.
No lanterns gleam. No lawless wind withdraws
to spare the tattered cloak of vacancy.
Once, perhaps, it wore a face. A voice
that sang of harvests in a sunlit realm,
of hands that cupped the pulse of earth’s rejoice—
now hollow as the bell of broken helm.
It seeks, they say (though none remain to say),
a thing misplaced between the birth of stars
and the slow rot of clay. A price to pay
in echoes. Yet the river blurs the scars,
and every step dissolves a syllable:
*A mother’s lullaby. A brother’s oath.*
*A lover’s vow, half-spoken, never still.*
The rain ingests these syllables like broth,
leaves only vapor in its wake. The soul
(if soul it be) now pauses, phantom palms
pressed to the bridge’s moss-crowned parole.
A tremor runs through iron, flesh, and psalms.
*“I knew a song,”* it murmurs to the stones.
*“The notes were kind. They lit the winter’s throat.
But now the tune is ash, the singer’s bones
are dust that feeds the roots of some remote
and unremembered oak.”* The river’s hymn
grows louder, laced with laughter’s ghostly toll—
a chorus from the drowned, their faces dim,
their tongues unspooling tales the waters stole.
The soul leans closer, drawn by liquid throes,
to peer into the current’s mirrored scroll.
What stares back lacks a mouth, a nose, a brow—
a smudge of smoke where once burned human coal.
*“Is this my face?”* it queries, but the stream
says nothing, carrying the question down
to depths where light forgets its right to gleam.
The bridge, indifferent, wears its thornèd crown.
A nightingale, rain-plucked and shivering,
alights upon the parapet’s rusted edge.
Its song, a needle stitching air, will sing
of gardens lost to fire and thistle’s pledge.
The soul extends a hand (transparent, frail),
but the bird flees, a comet’s fading breath.
*“Even the wingèd know to fear the tale
that ends in silence colder than a death.”*
Hours drown. The rain does not relent.
The river’s breath condenses into fog,
which climbs the bridge like ivy, omnipotent,
to strangle every crevice, log by log.
The soul, now kneeling, claws at vapored chains,
its throat a vault of unshed centuries.
*“What freedom waits beyond these endless rains?
What kingdom thrives where no king ever sees?”*
No answer comes. The bridge, a slanting tomb,
colludes with dusk to bury all it bears.
The soul, unmoored, accepts the creeping gloom,
lets go the anchors of its unanswered prayers.
One final gasp—a sigh that parts the mist—
and then the plunge: no splash, no rippled cry.
The river drinks the figure it has kissed,
absolves the ache of how and when and why.
Above, the rain still falls, a metronome
to mark the void where longing once held court.
The bridge remains, a ribcage stripped of home,
its stones now scribes of all they did not thwart.
And in the town beyond, where hearths still glow,
no one recalls the face that faded there—
though sometimes, when the midnight rivers flow,
they hear a whisper tangled in the air:
*“To be unbound is but to disappear.
The freest soul is one the world forgets.”*
The rain translates these words to orphaned tears,
and earth, obedient, lets the truth stay wet.
