The Orphan’s Covenant with Twilight

Here once, men say, a fountain’s diamond throat
Sang requiems to roses drenched in June,
Now choked with leaves like parchment notes afloat
On time’s black river—silent, out of tune.
The orphan knelt where peonies had wept
Their scarlet tears into the barren ground,
His fingers tracing promises unkept
In moss that shrouded tablets of the drowned.

“Speak to me,” he implored the eastern wall
Where lichen veiled a maiden’s stony eyes,
“Of she who walked these paths in shawl of shawl,
Whose laughter birthed the swallows’ twilight cries.”
The statue bled no wisdom but the drip
Of midnight dew down cheeks that knew no sun,
Her marble lips a cold and fruitless crypt
Where all the garden’s secrets had begun.

Three summers past, when first he’d breached the gate
(His ribs like shipwrecks ‘neath a threadbare shirt),
The child had found this realm disconsolate
But pulsing still with some primordial hurt.
Beneath the yew’s cathedral-dark embrace,
He’d pricked his thumb upon a thorn and sworn
To resurrect what time sought to efface,
To mend the tapestry left frayed and torn.

O sacred pact! The garden drank his oath
Through roots that coiled like veins in poisoned soil,
Each petal’s ghost inhaled his whispered troth,
Each branch a skeletal hand raised in toil.
He brought it worms to feast on blighted fruit,
Cupped rainwater in palms calloused and small,
Carved lullabies on bark with rusted flute
While shadows taught the statues how to crawl.

At dusk they’d speak—the boy and his domain—
In tongues of creaking boughs and rasping breath,
Of how the wisteria’s indigo mane
Once dripped like wine to toast a monarch’s death.
The hollyhocks confessed in velvet sighs
Their envy of the lilies’ funeral gowns,
While foxglove bells rang dirges to the skies
And nightshade wove its coronets of browns.

But lo! What pact with ruin ever held?
The fourth year came with frost’s maleficent kiss,
Crisping the edges of their fragile world
To ash that clung to memory’s abyss.
The pond, once quick with carp like liquid gold,
Grew thick with algae’s emerald disease,
While through the greenhouse’s fractured bones there rolled
A wind that carried echoes of the seas.

“Stay with me,” begged the garden through cracked earth,
Its voice the groan of roots in splintered throes,
“Recall your vow to guard my second birth,
To crown me queen of this necropolis throes.”
But Lysander’s blood ran thin with mortal chill,
His breath a fragile banner in the air,
While winter’s blade, honed on the granite hill,
Cut down the last delphiniums with care.

In final act, beneath the solstice moon,
He brought his treasured hoard of stolen things—
A locket cold as some sepulchral womb,
A nest where phoenix might have spread its wings,
Three petals from a grave in Flanders field,
A snail shell housing symphonies unborn,
All offered to the soil that would not yield
Beneath the weight of hope’s oppressive thorn.

The garden took his gifts and gave him back
A single leaf veined with prophetic dust,
Its edges curled like letters left unread,
Its hue the green of verdigree and rust.
That night, the boy who’d sworn to cheat decay
Coughed violets into his trembling hand,
Each bloom a perfect echo of the day
He first let death’s dark covenant expand.

Dawn found him folded ‘gainst the sundial’s base,
His hair entwined with willow’s weeping strands,
Eyes holding fast to some elusive face
That hovered where the mist kissed ruined lands.
The statues wept their limestone tears in vain,
The choked fountain breathed one final sigh,
As winter claimed its votive child again
Beneath a sky the color of a lie.

Now travelers who brave the iron gate
(Though few dare walk where shadows dine on light)
Report a voice that lingers near the slate
Where Lysander’s name erodes into the night.
They swear the garden breathes when frost descends,
That stone lips move in silent litany,
While through dead leaves a phantom hand extends
To trace the oath that binds mortality.