The Mariner’s Mirage

Three winters past, he swore by iron and blade,
To William, comrade bound in blood and mud,
“Should fate’s cold hand divide our borrowed breath,
The survivor shall bear witness to the flood—
Not tears, nor wine, but truth’s unflinching light
Shall guide him home through vengeance of the night.”

Yet William sleeps where poppies dare not bloom,
Beneath a field no lark’s song may redeem,
While Edmund walks, a specter clad in skin,
Haunted by whispers of a broken dream.
The oath, once forged in trenches choked with despair,
Now festers, phantom-chain, in salted air.

A gale, as if conspiring with his guilt,
Unfurls its wrath where sky and surge collide.
The horizon birthed a ship with sails of mist,
Its hull a ghostly galleon’s bleached hide.
No mortal crew manned rigging taut with frost,
But shadows danced where living men were lost.

“By Neptune’s trident!” Edmund gasped, near drowned
By winds that stole the breath from curses flung.
The vessel neared, its figurehead a face
Carved in the likeness of the friend he’d wronged—
William’s eyes, twin voids where stars once burned,
His wooden lips to judgment’s whisper turned.

“You pledged,” the specter’s voice the tempest wore,
“To carve my epitaph in truth’s pure vein.
Yet lies dripped honeyed from your trembling tongue,
Telling my mother I felt neither pain
Nor fear when cannon’s kiss split rib from soul—
A hero’s sleep, not screams that choked the hole.”

The soldier fell, his knees on granite raw,
“What truth serves worms that feast on lovers’ vows?
I gave her peace where you left only ash,
A kinder end than trench-mouth could allow!”
The ship’s timbers groaned like a widow’s cry,
“You made her love a lie. Now watch it die.”

The sea below convulsed, a liquid stage
Where memory’s curtain rose to scenes long sealed:
A cottage door where William’s mother stood,
Her eyes two lamps through war’s relentless field.
Each month Edmund had brought forged tales of grace,
While she, in gratitude, had kissed his face.

Now phantoms played their cruel theatrics there—
The true death writhed, displayed without disguise.
William’s last gargle through throat’s crimson sieve,
Fingers clutching Edmund’s lapel, blind eyes
Begging for myths to spare a parent’s heart.
The vision tore the soldier’s soul apart.

“Enough!” he roared, though storm stole half his breath,
“I’ll shatter silence, though it damn us both!”
He turned toward town where lanterns weakly glowed,
But the galleon surged like vengeance incarnate, loath
To loose its prey. Waves, taloned, claimed the shore,
Dragging him where no oath could bind anymore.

Salt claws embraced him, pulled him to the deep,
Where William’s ghost dissolved to seafoam’s sigh.
No tomb would hold Edmund, no dirge be sung,
Only the lighthouse beam, a cold judge’s eye,
Watched as the sea, that keeper of veiled truths,
Returned his sword—but not his plundered youth.

And in the cottage where two portraits weep,
A mother tends her roses, unaware
That both her sons now sleep beneath the waves,
One cradled by lies, one by despair.
The tempest fades; the moon, her silver sheet
Drapes over secrets even stars keep discreet.