Beneath the Whispering Cliffs of Memory

He sailed through mists that clung like cobwebbed years,
Each wave a dirge for joys dissolved in tears,
And when the cliffs arose—a craggy choir—
Their fissures hummed with echoes of desire.
The island breathed; its pines, like ancient hands,
Beckoned him toward the heart of veiled lands.
There, ‘midst the stones where gulls in sorrow wheeled,
A cottage crumbled, half by time concealed,
Its splintered door ajar, as though to say,
“The past awaits, but dare not linger—stay.”

Within, the air hung thick with ghostly hues,
A child’s chalk marks, blurred by tempests’ bruise,
Still clung to walls where ivy’s fingers crept.
A rusted swing, by winds of silence swept,
Swayed in the yard, its chains like hollow bones,
And in the dust, a face he’d known, half-shown—
A sister’s laugh, now swallowed by the gloom,
Her name a moth trapped in a shuttered room.
Here, once, they’d built their kingdoms in the sand,
Two souls entwined where sea met starlit land.

But tides, relentless, claimed her one dim eve,
When waves, grown wild as wolves, refused to leave.
He’d clutched her hand, the surf a frothing maw,
Till from his grip the cruel abyss withdrew,
And left him orphaned on the screaming shore,
Her final cry a wound that bled no more.
The years had cloaked the raw, unhealed divide,
Yet here, each shadow bore her phantom stride—
Her skipping steps imprinted in the moss,
Her voice, a breeze that murmured through the loss.

He dipped his brush in hues of salted ache,
And stroked the canvas till the cliffs awoke—
Not stone, but flesh; not waves, but sapphire tears,
And in their swell, her face from yonder years.
The cottage breathed anew with every stroke,
The swing’s lament a hymn the colors spoke,
Till from the void her spectre softly rose,
A girl of mist and memory composed.
“Dear brother,” sighed the shade, “why summon me?
The peace I keep is not for eyes to see.”

“Forgive,” he wept, “this trespass of the heart,
But art without your light is breathless art.
The world above is cold, its colors dim—
I sought the fire that once burned within him.”
Her form, like moonlight on a storm-tossed crest,
Grew faint, yet kindled sorrow in his breast:
“You chase a ghost through corridors of pain,
Yet what you seek, the waves will not regain.
The truest muse is not in tombs confined,
But in the love you leave, not left behind.”

Three nights he toiled, ensnared by fever’s trance,
While tides outside rehearsed their fatal dance.
He painted not her death, but life’s refrain—
The shared sunsets, the shells strung into chains,
The forts they raised where marram grass now bows,
The vows they’d sworn beneath the driftwood boughs.
But as he traced her smile’s ephemeral glow,
The sea, in wrath, reclaimed what it laid low.
A surge arose—a wall of green despair—
To crash upon the cliffs with vengeful air.

The cottage, steeped in decades of decay,
Succumbed to fists of foam and salt’s decay.
The painter stood, his masterpiece in hand,
As waters roared to drown the trembling land.
No flight he sought, nor mercy from the deep;
In final strokes, he etched her face to keep.
The wave’s embrace, both cruel and bittersweet,
Enfolded him where ocean’s pulse and heartbeat
Eclipsed the divide ‘twixt memory and morn—
Two children, once again, in sands reborn.

Now sailors tell of tides that, sighing, bear
A canvas washed to shore with tender care:
A girl and boy, their hands clasped in the spray,
Forever young beneath the moon’s pale sway.
But none discern the artist’s trace within
The pigments forged from where his world grew thin—
A requiem in azure, gold, and gray,
For love that art could summon, not delay.
The isle remains, its cliffs still hum the tune
Of hearts entwined, erased too late, too soon.