The Wilted Gate of Mnemosyne
Where twilight gnaws the edges of the sun,
There lies a garden none may find by day—
A labyrinth of thorns, half-born, undone.
Its gates, once gilded with celestial bloom,
Now sag like ribs of some forgotten beast,
Their iron veins consumed by tender gloom,
And on their rust, the years have carved their feast.
Here, through the cracks of time, a shadow slips—
An errant soul, unmoored from name or form,
Whose breath is but a mist on phantom lips,
Whose heart, a dormant ember, faintly warm.
It seeks what every vagrant ghost has sought:
The nectar of remembrance, dearly bought.
* * *
The air is thick with petals never born,
Their fragrance laced with echoes of a hymn
That once cascaded through the rose’s thorn
When life still pulsed in every seraphim.
Now marble nymphs, their eyes wept clean of light,
Stand sentinel o’er pathways overgrown,
Where lilies choke on whispers of the night,
And willows bend with secrets not their own.
The soul drifts past a fountain, dry and cracked,
Its basin filled with leaves like parchment scrolls
That tell of love entombed, of pacts intact
Beneath the weight of unrepented tolls.
“Who treads where even silence fears to weep?”
A voice, like roots in stone, begins to creep.
* * *
A figure blooms from shadows—veiled, austere—
A gardener of yore, though fleshless now,
Her hands a nest of vines, her gaze severe,
Her crown a circlet of the blighted bough.
“Why stir the dust of dreams long left to drown?
This plot is but a reliquary of sighs.
Each petal here is memory turned brown,
Each root a nerve that severed from its skies.”
The soul, though tongueless, spills its silent plea:
*I seek the bloom that does not bow to time,
The seed that roots beyond mortality,
The chord that binds the mortal to sublime.*
The gardener laughs—a sound of glass on slate—
“Child of ether, you court your own fate.
* * *
Follow the scar where once the river ran,
Past statues clad in ivy’s green despair,
To where the earth still bears the print of Man
And weeps in dew for those who vanished there.
But mark this well: to drink from Lethe’s spring
Is not to drown—it is to breathe anew.
Yet those who grasp too tight the mortal string
Find thorns where roses yearned to break through.”
The soul, now trembling like a moth’s torn wing,
Drifts onward through the maze of fractured stone,
Where shadows hum a dirge to stifle spring,
And every step exhales a stifled moan.
At last, a clearing—pale, a spectral glade—
And there, a single flower, unafraid.
* * *
A chrysanthemum, its petals spun
From threads of moonlight, frost, and vain desire,
Its stem a spine of ash, its face undone
By veins of cobalt, cold as funeral pyre.
It shivers not in wind that keens and claws,
But bows, as if to sip the sorrowed air,
And in its heart, a luminance withdraws—
A star outliving orbit, faint and rare.
The soul, unspooling toward the fragile blaze,
Feels time collapse like pages in a flame.
It reaches—oh, the distance it betrays!—
And plucks the bloom no mortal hand may claim.
The garden gasps. The petals shriek, then part—
A sigh escapes the flower’s splintered heart.
* * *
What pours forth is not light, nor song, nor tears,
But whispers—centuries of stifled cries,
The weight of every unkept oath, the fears
That festered in the dark of human eyes.
The soul, now drowning in this liquid night,
Recalls a face it swore it knew before
The severance of breath from body’s right,
A name now etched where no name may restore.
*I was a weaver of tales,* it dares to breathe,
*My hands once cradled hope like living grain.
But time, that thief, left autumn in my sheathe,
And all my threads grew frail beneath the rain.*
The flower’s breath turns sharp, a venom sweet:
“To hold is to be held by your defeat.”
* * *
The petals crumble, one by spectral one,
Each dissolution carving deeper still
A truth the soul had fled from, now undone—
That gardens fade, as every mortal will.
The light once cradled in the chrysanthemum
Dissolves into a swarm of firefly ghosts,
Their dance a fleeting, elegiac hum
Above the grave of all it valued most.
The gardener watches from her throne of briars,
Her voice a dirge that rustles through the weeds:
“You clung to ashes, fed on dead desires,
And yet, in letting go, the spirit bleeds.
Go, wanderer—now see what you’ve become:
A requiem, where once there was a drum.”
* * *
The soul, now fraying at its spectral seams,
Retreats through arches where the ivy grieves,
Each step a dirge, each breath a wisp of dreams
That scatter like the seeds of widowed leaves.
The gate ahead, once warped but still a door,
Now shudders as the soul attempts to pass—
Its iron teeth descend, a growl, a roar,
And lock the ghost within a cage of grass.
The garden drinks the essence from its veins,
A final harvest, bitter-sweet and slow,
Until the soul is but the shadow’s stains
On petals that no mortal wind may blow.
The gate, now crowned with wilted gold, proclaims:
*Here lies the dust that dared to love the flames.*
* * *
Dawn, when it comes, will find no trace of strife—
Just dew that weeps where neither foot nor wing
Disturbs the hush of this relinquished life,
And thorns that softly croon a lullaby.
The gardener tends her charges, cold and wise,
While somewhere, in the world beyond the wall,
A child picks a bloom, then wonders why
Its petals, touched, embrace the earth’s blind thrall.
But in the heart of that uncharted gloom,
Where shadows breed and breaths grow thin as threads,
A chrysanthemum stirs in phantom womb—
Its roots now fed by all the soul forfeits.
And thus the garden grows, both tomb and womb,
Where hope, once plucked, must always meet its doom.
