The Keeper’s Vow and the Wanderer’s Folly
A traveler cloaked in dust of forgotten trails,
His shadow a frayed banner, his breath a name
Whispered to stones where no compassion prevails.
Through thistle and time’s unkind conspiring,
He sought the myth of roots that drink the stars,
A garden veiled by mists of ceaseless yearning,
Where walls of ivy clasped like prison bars.
There, amidst roses weeping dew like regrets,
A figure stood—guardian of petaled throats—
Her hands gloved in twilight, her coronet
Woven of frost and chrysanthemum notes.
“What pilgrim dares,” she sang, “to walk this aisle
Where blossoms curtsy to no mortal vow?
This plot is bound by older covenants’ guile—
Speak your trespass or take the briar’s bow.”
He knelt, though stones bit deep his weary palms:
“I seek no fruit nor fragrance to possess,
But respite from the road’s unending qualms,
A night’s asylum in your green confessional.
Let silence mend what words have torn asunder,
Let roots prescribe their balm to wandering feet.”
She weighed his plea ’neath arches of night’s wonder,
Then bid him enter where two solitudes meet.
Dawns bled to dusk in that sequestered sphere—
He learned the lexicon of whispering leaves,
Deciphered how the lilies’ golden tear
Foretold the weight that every heart receives.
She taught him seasons knotted in one glade,
How winter’s breath could kiss an August bloom,
And why the fountain’s silver serenade
Held notes no ear could carry from the tomb.
“This earth,” she murmured, “bears a antique debt—
A vow etched deep before the first seed woke—
To guard the gate where life and longing met,
To tend the flame no mortal hand may stroke.
Should ever my vigil falter or grow faint,
These boughs will don their thorns like swords unsheathed,
The soil choke on ashes of complaint,
And every petal fall to dust beneath.”
He swore—oh, swear he did—with fervent tongue,
To keep her company in gilded shade,
To let no foot beyond their bond be flung,
Nor seek the world beyond the green stockade.
Their hands entwined like vines round oak’s strong arm,
Two wayward souls in symmetry confined,
He thought her smile could silence all alarm,
Her voice outchime the clocks of humankind.
But roads, like wolves, sing hymns to vagrant blood—
He woke one morn to hear the wild geese cry,
Their wings unspooling maps in teal and mud,
A beckoning no garden could deny.
The guardian marked his gaze’s restless dart,
Felt autumn’s ghost breathe cold against her neck:
“Remember when we wove our lives apart
From Time’s rough loom—shall we now break that thread?”
He paced the paths they’d trod in shared refrain,
Now narrowed, like a chain about his throat,
Each blossom’s scent a sweetly cloying chain,
Each birdsong now a judge’s brittle note.
“One day,” he pled, “to walk where winds run free—
Not to forsake our compact, but to know
What weight lies on the world beyond this tree—
I’ll return ere the moon dares stoop so low.”
Her fingers brushed his cheek—a moth’s farewell—
“Go trace the horizon’s ever-shifting line,
But mark this well, oh mark this passing well:
No foot twice drinks the same swift river’s wine.
Should shadows lure you past our bounded mark,
The garden’s heart will pay the toll in woe.”
He kissed her palm, now trembling in the dark,
And crossed the threshold where the wild winds blow.
What follies bloom beyond the sheltered bowers!
He drank from skies unshackled, vast, and loud,
Ran fingers through the storm’s electric hours,
Let thunder’s drum erase the silent vow.
Three suns he raced with clouds as comrades true,
Three moons he laughed at borders’ foolish claims,
Till on the fourth dawn’s light, a scent he knew—
Petrichor and rot, the garden’s dying flames.
He followed crows that croaked a dirge ahead,
Their feathers ink blots on the ashen air,
To find the gate where once sweet myrrh was shed
Now hung with vines as sere as severed hair.
No guardian stood with twilight in her hands—
Just wilted stems that rattled like dry bones,
And at the center, where the fountain’s strands
Once danced, a pool of blackened, stagnant stones.
Beneath the oak they’d named their covenant’s shrine,
He found her—not the florid queen of yore,
But something wrought of splinter and dead vine,
Her eyes two shriveled berries, hands clawed ore.
“You lingered,” croaked the thing that bore her voice,
“Beyond the measure our frail pact could bear.
The garden’s doom was wrought by your false choice—
Now reap the harvest of your fickle care.”
He grasped her thorn-riddled, crumbling frame,
“What curse is this? What sentence have I wrought?”
Her laugh a rasp of leaves devoured by flame:
“You sought the open sky—well, sky you’ve bought.
Freedom’s price is etched in every root—
To walk untethered, one must first destroy
The tethers. Go—wander, absolved, astute—
But know your road now treads on orphaned joy.”
The earth beneath him shuddered, split, and sighed,
As roots emerged like bones from shallow graves,
Each petal, leaf, and stem in gasping died,
While he stood chained to choices none could save.
When last light failed, the grove was but a scar—
A blight on clay, a smudge of ended tales.
The traveler turned, his freedom bought too far,
And walked through fields where even shadows fail.
Now sometimes, when the moon wears silver gauze,
A shape is seen where ruins choke the springs—
A man who digs with bare and bleeding claws,
Mumbling of oaths to statues without wings.
The crows recount in guttural refrain
How gardens die when guarded by two souls,
How freedom’s sweetest draught is mortal pain,
And how the road, once chosen, never tolls.
