The Ballad of Broken Vows and Vanished Years

His name, a ghost once carv’d on yonder oak
Now split by lightning’s argent, vengeful blade;
His eyes, two pools where ancient sorrows soak,
Hold decades pressed like flowers, dimly frayed.
Each morn he tends the graves of unplowed years,
While memory’s ivy chokes the crumbling wall,
And whispers to the mist: “She lingers here—
I hear her shadow when the thrushes call.”

Long ere the rot crept silent through these lanes,
When golden wheat still danced to August’s lyre,
He knelt where seven violets claimed the plains
And pledged a troth that stars swore to inspire.
“Though seasons turn and tempests rend the sky,”
He vowed, “no storm shall breach this hallowed ground.
While breath remains, no harm shall venture nigh
These harvests, homes, and hearts by love embrowned.”

But O, what mortal chain resists the tide
When Fortune’s wheel, ice-cold, begins its spin?
The blight came first—black petals spreading wide,
A creeping plague that choked the life within.
Then famine’s breath, a serpent thin and gray,
Unwove the fields they’d nourished drop by drop,
Till mothers bore their babes to tombs of clay,
And wine of triumph dried in sorrow’s cup.

Yet still he fought, this guardian of dust,
With hands now claw-like, gripping faith’s last thread.
He fed the young with roots of vanished trust,
And sang the ballads of the vow they’d wed.
But when the fever came—that raven beast
Which feasts not just on flesh but shattered oaths—
He watched his people flee towards the East,
Their footprints filled with curses, not with hopes.

Alone he stayed, as maple leaves turn flame
And burn themselves to ash in autumn’s pyre.
Each cottage beam now bears some neighbor’s name
Scratched deep by guilt’s unrelenting sapphire.
The well, where lovers once would meet and plead,
Now echoes with the weight of unshed tears,
While through the church’s ribs, pale moonbeams bleed
To paint false life on dead men’s vanished years.

One twilight, as the west wind played a dirge
On rafters of the mill where hope was ground,
A figure came—a shade upon the verge
Of being and echo, robed in silence profound.
No pilgrim this, but Death in gardener’s guise,
His scythe a silver birch branch, smooth and thin.
“Old keeper of the soil where promise dies,
Why cling to ruins? Let new life begin.”

The elder raised his face, a cracked relief
Where rivers of regret had carved their course.
“Begone, false harvester! My oath, though brief,
Still roots me here. I’ll break no second force.”
But Death knelt soft, his voice a summer brook:
“Your vow was pure as dawn’s first blushing light,
Yet rivers change their beds—no sin, no slight—
When mountains crumble and the heavens shake.”

Three days they parleyed neath the yew’s dark boughs,
While shadows lengthened like accused men’s lies.
Death offered peace; the old man kept his vows,
Their arguments entwining earth and skies.
At last, when frost had etched its crystal verse
On every naked branch and sleeping stone,
The ancient’s voice, now broken, did disperse:
“I’ll walk with you… but not till spring has flown.”

What mercy dwells in hearts that deal despair?
Death left him there to watch one final bloom—
To see the cherry tree they’d planted where
First kisses sweetened youth’s perfume.
All winter long he whispered to the snows
That shrouded cottages like linen veils,
While in his chest, a tighter chill arose
To still the clockwork of his body’s tale.

At length, when April’s tentative first green
Peered through the mist like children half-afraid,
He dragged his bones to where the oath had been
And dug with bleeding hands where vows were laid.
There lay the token—tarnished silver band
Engraved with names the rain had washed to ghosts.
He clasped it to the hourglass of sand
That once was flesh, now waiting at Death’s posts.

“Forgive me,” breathed the keeper to the breeze
That carried memory’s scent of lavender.
“Though walls may fall and loyalties may cease,
True faith resides in love’s unmeasured err.”
The silver fell, through roots and worms and time,
To rest where no blight’s bitter tooth could gnaw—
A seed perhaps, in some more clement clime,
Of promises that need no mortal law.

Then came a sound the village had not known
Since laughter fled—a sigh that was not pain.
The cherry tree, though long bereft and lone,
Shook free white blossoms in a sweet rain.
They fell like stars upon his silvered hair,
Like bridal veils to shroud his final sleep,
While somewhere, two shades danced on fragrant air,
And winds erased the tracks where men don’t weep.

Now travelers (though few dare tread this way)
Report soft voices near the crumbled wall—
Not grief’s harsh keening, but the tender play
Of whispers from some timeless festival.
They say the cherry blooms in dead of winter,
That silver gleams where moonlight kisses stone,
And oaths, though snapped, leave prints that faintly hint her
Eternal ‘Yes’ to vows outlasted, grown.

Thus ends the tale of one who held too fast
To mortal chains ‘gainst Time’s unyielding stream.
Let all who hear this dirge of love outcast
Ponder the weight of oaths we can’t redeem.
For even truest hearts may break their ties
When fate’s cruel pendulum demands its toll—
Yet in that breaking, phoenix-strong may rise
The essence of devotion’s perfect soul.