The Ballad of Rain and Unstrung Lutes

*“Play not that tune,”* a voice implores,
A specter clad in silken sores—
A lady veiled in midnight lace,
Her eyes two voids of time’s disgrace.
*“For seven moons I’ve walked this span,
To find the ghost of who I am.
You swore beneath this vault of stone,
To carve our names where none are known.”*

The minstrel’s breath, a fractured sigh,
Recalls the night she dared to die—
Her gown a splash of stolen light,
Her vow extinguished by the night.
*“Lenore,”* he rasps, *“the bridge remembers,
But flesh forgets December’s embers.
You left my chords to rot unstrung,
When pealing bells denounced our tongue.”*

Her laughter chills the river’s throat,
A melody of shattered note:
*“You pledged to wait till stars resign,
Yet fled when clocks denounced the sign.
My father’s hounds gnawed through your name,
But rain revives what men proclaim—
Tonight, we’ll mend what fate untwined,
Or drown in vows we left behind.”*

He plucks a thread from memory’s loom,
A dirge for blooms that died too soon—
The night she slipped through duty’s gate,
Her love a wisp, his heart a crate
Of letters drowned in waxen seals,
Their ink dissolved by stolen meals.
*“I starved,”* he croaks, *“beneath these planks,
While feasts mocked through manor blanks.
Your world spat songs like rotten fruit—
What harmony could treason suit?”*

Her hand, a leaf in winter’s fist,
Grazes his cheek through evening’s mist:
*“You called me muse, then called me lie,
When frost first kissed my lullaby.
Yet here I haunt our fractured creed—
The bride of greed, the wraith of need.
Play now the strain we forged in stealth,
Or watch me leap to phantom health.”*

The lute awakes in gasps and groans,
A symphony of cracking bones—
Each note a nail in love’s closed coffin,
Each pause the breath of chains gone soften.
She sways, a sapling in the storm,
Her form dissolving, growing warm
As music stitches flesh to ghost,
A moment’s balm for what they lost.

*“Forgive,”* she mourns, *“the vows I kept,
When waking dawns found me inept.
My bed was stone, my crown was thorn,
The child we dreamed still stillborn.”*
The minstrel’s tears salt iron strings,
As bridgewood creaks and raven wings
Eclipse the moon—her spectral face
Now fades where shadows interlace.

*“Stay!”* he wails to vacant dark,
But river’s tongue devours his mark.
Her veil remains, a shroud half-torn,
A relic of the oath they’d sworn.
Dawn licks the stones with fevered light—
The lute lies split, its maker’s plight
A footnote in the mud below,
Where lovers’ bones forget to grow.

Years gnaw the bridge with salted teeth,
Yet travelers swear they hear beneath
A duel of dirge and whispered screams,
Two shadows waltzing in moonbeams.
The wise stride swift, their whispers low:
*“Beware the rain’s addictive woe—
Where vows are carved in liquid script,
And hearts by tides of promise gripped.”*

But fools still pause to clutch the rail,
Entranced by grief’s unending tale.
They toss coins to the void and plead
For loves as raw, as wildly freed—
Not knowing in the depths below,
A lute still hums of might-have-been,
And two ghosts tread where none have been,
Bound tighter by the debt of rain,
Than flesh-bound hearts that break in vain.