The Ruin’s Whisper
A crippled city slumps, its bones of marble cold.
Through arches cracked like sorrow’s teeth, the winds conspire,
To chant the dirge of fallen kings and empires’ pyres.
Here, where the ivy strangles stones that once held grace,
An ancient wanderer treads with time-worn face,
His cloak a shroud of memories, his staff a splintered yearn,
For days when banners laughed aloft and hearths did burn.
The Old Man’s name, once roared in halls of gold,
Now rusts upon the tongues of ghosts, a tale untold.
Each dusk, he climbs the broken western stair,
To gaze where sunsets bleed through ribs of vacant air.
“O Freedom!” whispers he, to shadows long deceased,
“Why dance you now in dust, where once your flames increased?
These streets, my cradle, now my cage of sighs,
Where eagles perched now haunt as vulture cries.”
One eve, as autumn’s throat began to choke,
He heard a sound—a lute’s frail, trembling note.
It slithered through the rubble’s gaping maw,
A melody half-born of hope, half-clawed by awe.
Through labyrinthine wounds where rooftops yawned,
He followed it, his pulse a storm, his breath ensnared,
Till in a square where fountains wept black tears,
A figure stood, enrobed in twilight’s veils.
A youth? A ghost? The lines of truth grew thin.
Her hair, a silver river, cheeks where life had never been,
Yet in her hands, the lute’s last string did hum,
A song he knew—the anthem of his fallen home.
“Stranger,” she murmured, voice like leaves in tombs,
“Why gnaw the bones of graves where rot consumes?
I sing for those who built their hearts too high,
Whose freedom’s wings became the chains they fly.”
The Old Man quaked, for in her hollow gaze,
He saw the pyre’s glow of bygone days.
“Who are you, wraith, that steals my city’s tongue?
What right have you to mourn what I, too, sung?”
She smiled—a crack in porcelain, bleak and brief—
“I am the daughter of your unbelief,
The echo of the price you dared not pay,
When Freedom’s light demanded you betray.”
Betray? The word struck iron in his chest.
Memories, long chained, now reared with feral zest:
A throne room’s roar, his sword lain down, unblooded,
The pact inked blind, his people’s fate unjudged.
“You chose the peace of slaves,” the specter sneered,
“And sold their birthrights for the bread of fear.
These ruins are your masterpiece, old sire,
A monument to safety’s pyre.”
The lute’s string snapped. The square inhaled, then stilled.
The Old Man’s knees struck earth, his essence spilled.
“I died that day,” he croaked to crumbling stones,
“But not for them—for her. For flesh and bones.
My daughter, pale as dawn’s first butchered streak,
They held her life as ransom for my meek.
What crown, what cause, could bid me let her bleed?
I chose her heart. I chose—and here, we bleed.”
The specter’s form began to fray, to dim,
Her edges merging with the dusk’s grim hymn.
“And so you birthed a world where none are free,
Where love’s sharp blade cuts deeper than the decree.
Farewell, fond fool. Your grief has dressed these stones.
Your freedom died to save what now alone…
… remains.” She vanished, leaving but a note,
That curled like smoke inside his throttled throat.
He clutched the earth, the city’s corpse his bride,
And howled her name—the name he’d sanctified.
Above, the stars, indifferent as the law,
Watched ice condense where justice once held flaw.
Dawn came, ashen and void. The square held fast,
Its silence now his judge, its ruins vast.
They found him there, his fingers clawed in mud,
His eyes two voids where Freedom’s ghost had stood.
No ballads rose to mourn the choice he made,
No laurels wilted where his form was laid.
The city, wiser in its slow decay,
Kept secret how a father’s love could slay
The very dream his hands had vowed to shield—
That Freedom’s field must never yield,
Yet dies when held too close, too dear,
A flame snuffed out by sheltering fear.
“`
