The Chronicler of Forgotten Hours
There lies a street—vieille et pavée—where time herself has not yet flown.
Its ancient bones recall the weight of footsteps lost in mist and dream,
And through its veins the whispered tales pulse soft, a slow eternal stream.
Here dwells the man—the Chroniqueur—whose quill like silver threads unspools
The moments lost, the vanishing, the dust among the village’s jewels.
His eyes, two wells of sombre dusk, reflect the myriad fading days,
Memories locked in amber’s grasp, enshrined within his silent gaze.
He wanders ‘midst the curling smoke of hearths long cold, and gardens wild,
Where echoes of forgotten laughter cling like ivy, blue and mild.
His voice, a murmur cloaked in time, recounts the vanishing of hours—
Casting netted words to catch the ghosts, trapped fluttering among the flowers.
Oft by the lamp’s flickering glow, he traces lines of yesterday,
In script of sighs and whispered lore, the chronicles of decay.
He writes of lives, brief candles burned in breezes harsh or tender-warm,
Of loves entombed in silence deep, and horrors cloaked beneath the calm.
But memory—capricious muse—betrays the chronicler’s careful art;
What once stood firm dissolves to shade, a trembling shadow steals the heart.
Faces melt into the fog—names are ghosts without a breath—
Time unravels all but loss, inviolate is death.
One eve, beneath a lantern’s eye, the Chronicler paused to hear,
A voice like dew upon the leaves, so faint, so sharp, so near:
“Why do you tether days to page, as if the dead would rise anew?
What solace lies in restless search for vanished tableau?”
He turned, his gaze a river wide, reflecting starlit, aching skies.
“A man is but the sum of hours—forgotten hours, as life complies.
To lose remembrance is to drown beneath the flood’s encroaching shade,
The soul dissolves, a castaway ’ere mortal breath may fade.”
The voice inquired, “Yet what if time erodes all traces, slips so fleet?
Shall we not live by present sun and trust its warmth is sweet?”
He answered slow, “The present is a fleeting, fragile glass—
The past, the mirror’s deeper realm wherein our spirits pass.”
In rapt repose, his words took flight—an allegory spun:
A clock with hands of trembling glass, its chimes undone, undone.
The gears, entwined in memory’s mist, ceased slowly in their course,
Yet still the empty silence sang of some enduring force.
Around him, walls of ancient stone breathed history’s heavy sigh,
And through the sills the autumn wind, a mournful lullaby.
The village slept beneath a sky where stars like lanterns winked—
And in the dark, the Chronicler’s heart pondered what was linked.
For oft he dreamed of rivers wide that washed away the past,
Of petals crushed beneath the feet—of moments not to last.
But in these ruins, cobbles worn and stories faintly told,
He grasped at something fragile, true—a thread of living gold.
A child’s laughter in the square, a tune half-heard at dawn—
Reminders that the spirit’s flame is neither lost nor gone.
Yet who shall tell their tales when he—the keeper—breath does cease?
What fate awaits the scattered shards that memory might release?
He strode amidst the empty homes, the hollowed hearths and walls,
Felt on his skin the bitter chill that night’s dark curtain falls.
Yet in his breast, a flickering hope, uncertain as the stars,
That stories borne on whispered wind might heal humanity’s scars.
A second voice arose from dusk, a thought not yet begun:
“Perhaps the tale is never writ, but endless, ever spun—
An open song, a ceaseless dance where endings sway to starts;
Each memory a seed anew within the human heart.”
The Chronicler’s eyes, now moist, beheld the moon’s pale grace,
A symbol wrought in argent light upon his weathered face.
He understood: to bind the past is to embrace the stream—
Not clutch the water, but the flow, the boundless, endless dream.
And so he lifts his quill anew, with trembling, reverent hand,
To weave the fleeting into words, to grace the shifting sand.
No stanza fixed, no closure near—just fragments left to glean—
The tapestry of all that was, and all that lies between.
The village breaths an ageless breath; the pavement waits, unmoved,
While Time, the patient weaver, with silent threads has proved:
That memory, a fragile flame, requires no final say—
For in the telling and retelling, it ever finds its way.
Thus stands the Chronicler still, beneath a pale, unending sky,
A sentinel of human fate—where past and present tie.
His story neither closed nor sealed, but poised upon the brink—
A whispered question lingering: what more remains to think?
And with the dawn yet not arrived, the tale remains afloat—
An open page, a lingering hope, within each whispered note.
For as the old street gently sings beneath the stars’ soft nod,
The heart of humankind beats on—remembered, flawed, but awed.
