The Brush of Unfulfilled Dawns

Here came the painter, gauntlet of despair,
His palette parched as autumn’s final leaf,
To seek what phantoms in the stagnant air
Might reignite the embers of belief.
“I’ll paint the silence,” swore his trembling hand,
“Or perish where the colors dare not land.”

The villagers, though few, were shadows cast
By some dim lantern memory withheld—
Their eyes, twin pools where hope had breathed its last,
Their voices, moths to flames they could not quell.
An ancient crone, her spine a question mark,
Muttered of curses woven into loam,
While children, pale as petals stripped of bark,
Sang dirges for a king without a throne.

Yet one soul drifted separate from the throng—
A woman clad in twilight’s ashen gown,
Who glimmered like a half-remembered song
And wore her sorrow like a thornèd crown.
Her gaze, two chalices of quicksilver pain,
Drank deep the stranger’s unspoken refrain.

“What specter haunts these walls?” the artist cried,
As easel creaked beneath his burdened art.
The woman’s laugh—a brooklet’s frozen sigh—
Unstitched the seams around his calloused heart.
“We wait,” she breathed, “for he who swore to rise
And paint our sorrows into starlit skies.”

Her words unfurled a tale of trust betrayed:
A lover-king, an oath etched in the bark
Of oaks long felled, a pledge to purge the shade
That strangled harvests, left the meadows stark.
“He vowed to bear our grief on crimson wings,
To drown the dark with dawn’s eternal hymn—
But fled when shadows bared their feral stings,
Leaving our vows to rot, our hearts to dim.”

The painter’s brush, now quivering mid-air,
Caught silver in the woman’s tear-streaked light.
“What if,” he pled, “this hand could dare repair
The fractures where your anguish took its flight?”
Her smile, a sickle moon in mist’s embrace,
Cut deeper than the lies he’d dubbed his grace.

Through nights that coiled like serpents ’round their throats,
He labored to transfigure pain to pigment—
Each stroke a battle ’gainst the void that floats
Between intent and acts forever smudged.
The woman watched, her form dissolving slow
As dawns he stole from dusk began to glow.

He painted children’s cheeks with stolen sun,
Wove gold through wheatfields ravaged by despair,
Conjured a king whose reign had just begun
From ash and ochre, blood and midnight air.
Yet as the village quickened, breathed, revived,
The artist felt his essence unraveling—
Each hue he birthed left less of him alive,
As shadows clawed the chords where reason clung.

The final morn—a canvas drenched in flame—
Revealed the cruel arithmetic of art:
To resurrect, one must become the same
As those pale ghosts that shiver in the dark.
The woman knelt, her locket (long held shut)
Unclasped to show the king’s face—*his* own, etched
In youth’s bold lines, now screaming through the rut
Of time’s deceit. The truth left him unmeshed.

“You’ve come,” she wept, “to finish what began—
The oath you broke lives in your rotted veins.”
His brush clattered like bones on marble, ran
The poison of remembrance through his reins.
He saw it now—the loop, the curse, the lie
That bound his soul to rectify or die.

The village, wailing, reached through years to clutch
At robes he’d worn when first he fled their pleas.
The portraits wept vermilion tears, and such
Was beauty’s cost—it choked him by degrees.
The woman’s hands, now smoke and silver thread,
Cupped his face as judgment’s storm unfurled:
“You gave us hope, then let it wither dead—
Now join your masterpiece: a broken world.”

His final stroke—a slash of desperate white—
Erased the king, the fields, the promised dawn,
Leaving a void where once there burned a light
And canvas stretched to veil what lingered on.
The villagers dissolved like ink in rain,
The woman’s sigh the last note of their pain.

Now wanderers who brave the moor’s tight fist
Report a figure chained to easel’s wood,
Repainting scenes the mists insist exist—
A king, a pledge, a vow misunderstood.
But colors rot where truth and fraud combine,
And madness blooms where love and guilt entwine.

Beneath the soil, the locket’s rusted gleam
Still whispers of the dawn that never broke,
While in the wind, the echoes of a scream
Condemn all artists who mistake the stroke
Of genius for the strength to bear the cost
When every radiant dream hides mortal frost.