Echoes of a Shadowed Dawn
A youth, whose soul was carved from twilight’s brittle grain,
Trod softly through the bones of some forgotten shrine,
Where ivy choked the altars, pale as dead men’s spine.
His eyes, twin pools wherein the stars had drowned their light,
Sought shadows of a past that fled like phantom flight,
For here, in crypts where Time herself had cracked her glass,
Lay etched the sacred whispers of a boy’s “Alas.”
The temple groaned, its arches bent like sorrow’s bow,
Each stone a weathered face that murmured tales of woe.
He traced the faded hymns adorning splintered wood—
A liturgy of laughter lost where childhood stood.
“O Memory,” he breathed, “thou merciless, sweet thief,
Why gnaw the bones of joy yet spare the fangs of grief?
Here knelt I once, a child with hands unstained by rhymes,
Before the serpent Years had hissed through verdant climes.”
A rustling sigh replied—not wind, nor beast, nor leaf—
But something spectral spun from anguish and belief.
The air grew thick with incense long since turned to dust,
And there, where moonbeams writhed in silver-grey disgust,
A figure flickered, wrought from smoke and searing light,
A girl whose hair cascaded like extinguished night.
Her voice, a silver needle threading through his veins:
“Dear brother, must we dance this waltz of endless pains?”
He staggered, for her face was both the wound and blade—
A portrait etched in fire, now in ashes laid.
“Elara!” cried his soul, though silence gripped his throat,
As years collapsed like bridges burned by Time’s grim note.
Ten winters past, they’d played where crumbling columns soared,
Two children weaving daisy chains upon the sward,
Till curiosity, that viper in the grass,
Had lured her to the well where Death’s black waters mass.
“’Tis but a game,” she’d laughed, her cheeks with mirth aflame,
“To peek into the earth’s dark heart and stake our claim!”
But stones, like ancient teeth, gave way beneath her tread,
And down she fell, her final scream unanswered,
Into the maw where echoes choke on swallowed cries,
Leaving him alone beneath indifferent skies.
The well’s cold mouth still yawned, a scar upon the earth,
A monument to innocence’s shattered worth.
Now here she stood—or seemed to stand—in spectral guise,
Her eyes twin voids that mirrored his own desolate skies.
“You’ve bartered youth for verses steeped in wormwood’s taste,”
She whispered, “built your throne where common joys lay waste.
What demon urged you back to dig these bones anew?
Can ghosts grant absolution mortals never knew?”
He reached, but through his fingers slipped her form like sand,
A cruel mirage sculpted by regret’s rough hand.
“I sought,” he rasped, “to clasp the hands I failed to save,
To rewrite endings in this necropolis of graves.
Each stanza I’ve carved since that day the sun went cold
Has been a shard of mirror where our tale is told.
They call me poet—fool! For all my crafted lines
Are but the wails that echo through these blackened shrines.”
She smiled, a crescent knife that split the veil of years:
“You wear your grief like laurels wet with unshed tears.”
Dawn’s first pale finger trembled on the eastern brink,
As specter and survivor stood where worlds collide,
Two shadows cast by one lost light, both petrified.
“The well remains,” she murmured, “yet you fear to peer—
Not at my fate, but at the truth you’ve sealed with fear.
That day, when roots gave way and stones screamed their betrayal,
You froze—not from cowardice, but love’s frail derail.
The guilt you’ve nursed like some rare, venomous bloom
Is but a child’s heart drowning in assumed doom.”
He fell to knees that cracked like temple marble worn,
While somewhere, nightingales mourned dusk’s stillborn morn.
“All words are ash,” he wept, “if they cannot reclaim
The pulse of your lost laughter, sweet as spring’s first flame.
What use these metaphors that dance like courtly fools
When silence holds the language of our shattered rules?”
Her form began to fray, gold dust on sorrow’s breath:
“You’ve made of memory a life-in-death, a death-in-life.”
The temple shuddered, ancient griefs long interred
Now clawing through their cerements, by his pain stirred.
Stones wept their lichen tears as arches strained to break,
Earth’s heartbeat quickening beneath this doomed remake.
“Farewell,” her voice now distant as a buried bell,
“The poet’s curse—to see, yet never pierce the veil.
Go, carve your verses from the marrow of this night,
But leave these halls where shadows feed on borrowed light.”
He rose, a man no more, but parchment scorched and bare,
Each step from that accursed ground a silent prayer.
Behind him, with a sigh that shook the firmament,
The temple crumbled—Time’s last, bitter testament.
Where once two children chased the dappled light as one,
Now sprawled a tomb of dust beneath the conquered sun.
The well, though filled with rubble, gaped like Nature’s scorn,
A mouth that once sang life now spewed the teeth of morn.
He wandered east, where dawn’s false promise stained the skies,
The ghost of laughter etched in corners of his eyes.
In every brook that babbled of forgotten days,
He saw her face; in every copse, her phantom gaze.
The poems yet unwrit would sing of this despair—
Of temples built on sand, of breaths that hang in air,
Of hands that clutch at shadows slipping through their cage,
And youth’s sweet wine turned vinegar with weight of age.
So ends the singer’s tale—no moral, no reprieve,
Just echoes of a dawn where all we love takes leave.
The curse remains: to see the beauty in the bleed,
To trace the sacred in the ruins of our need.
Let bards sing on, their ballads ripe with borrowed sighs,
While Truth, that ancient well, waits patient, deep, and wise,
To swallow every golden lie we dare to spin,
And keep the sacred pain that makes us human kin.
