The Dust of Forgotten Valor
A shadow crawls, a fractured form, beneath relentless skies.
His uniform, once crisp and proud, now tattered as his soul,
Harold treads the endless waste, where time’s vast currents roll.
The war had claimed his vigor’s bloom, yet spared his mortal frame,
And left him but a hollow shell to bear its whispered shame.
The sand, like whispers of the dead, did coil about his feet,
Each grain a ghost, each gust a plea, his solitude complete.
No banner waved, no comrade’s voice, no drum’s defiant call—
Just sun-bleached bones of memory to mark war’s bitter thrall.
He clutched a locket, cold and worn, where two faces yet smiled,
A sister’s grace, a mother’s touch—both lost to time’s exile.
Three moons had waxed and waned since he had fled the battle’s roar,
Yet still the desert’s maw stretched wide, a labyrinth without door.
His canteen dry, his lips like stone, he dreamed of verdant rains,
Of rivers threading emerald veins through life-forgotten plains.
But visions fade where hope is chained to sorrow’s iron wheel—
The dunes, they shifted, cruel and slow, to mock his frail ordeal.
Then, on the fourth day’s scorching march, a shape emerged from haze:
A skeletal tree, its branches bare, clawed at the sky in praise.
Beneath its shade, a weathered trunk, a chest of oak and rust,
Its lock long shattered by the years, its hinges fled to dust.
With trembling hands, he pried it wide, and there, in stillness laid,
A stack of letters, bound with twine, by time and grief unmade.
The first began with “Dearest John,” in script both firm and fair,
A soldier’s mother’s tender words, a cross to subtly bear.
The second spoke of harvests missed, a father’s failing health,
The third, a sweetheart’s trembling vow to guard her heart by stealth.
But ’twas the fourth that froze his breath—a name he knew too well—
“To Harold, brother of my soul,” it read. His own heart fell.
For John had been his closest friend, his shield in battle’s storm,
Whose laughter once had warmed the nights, now cold beneath the worm.
“Dear Hal,” it sighed, “if this finds you, then I am surely gone.
Forgive the silence I have kept, this secret I have borne.
That day we charged the eastern ridge, ’twas not the foe’s sure aim
That felled me, but the shrapnel’s burst from *your* gun’s fatal flame.”
The world dissolved to ash and wind. He knelt, as mountains fell.
The locket’s edge bit deep his palm—a pain no match for hell.
For years he’d nursed a hero’s tale, of how he’d borne John high,
Through hail of lead, to safety’s myth, beneath a bloodied sky.
Yet all the while, the truth had slept, a serpent in the sand,
To strike now with such venom’s chill no mortal could withstand.
The letters slipped like phantoms from his grasp, to ride the breeze,
Each word a judge, each page a dirge that hummed among the trees.
He cried aloud, but sound was swallowed by the desert’s breast,
As guilt, a vulture, pecked the marrow from his ravaged chest.
“O blind and blundering hand of fate!” he roared to heavens vast,
“What justice dwells in twisted chance? What balance in the past?”
No answer came but shifting sands, their whispers soft and dry,
A symphony of indifference beneath the uncaring sky.
The tree, a sentinel of time, bore witness to his grief,
As Harold clawed the earth below, begging for relief.
But mercy’s gate stays barred to those who wander fate’s bleak maze—
The sun dipped low, a crimson wound, to crown his final days.
He stumbled forth, a wraith now, through the cooling desert night,
The locket’s faces blurred by tears, the stars devoid of light.
Dawn found him prone, his fingers traced a name in ancient stone—
A weathered marker, half-submerged, where none would mourn alone.
“Here lies a soldier, name erased,” the carving dared to tell,
“Who fought the desert’s endless war and found his kinship… hell.”
And in that grim, ironic bed, where two graves met as one,
Harold laid his broken form, undone by what he’d done.
The locket ope’d, two portraits merged—his mother’s fading grace,
His sister’s smile, John’s steadfast gaze—all time could not erase.
The desert breathed, a sigh profound, and wrapped him in her sheet,
As dunes embraced their wayward son, and closed the tale complete.
Thus Harold sleeps where sands conspire to veil the truths we bear,
Where valor’s dust and sorrow’s rust are twins beneath the air.
No ballads hymn his restless shade, no roses grace his tomb,
For history’s tide rolls swift and sure, and swallows all such gloom.
Yet sometimes, when the sirocco wails its mournful, endless tune,
Two ghosts are seen, their hands clasped tight, beneath the spectral moon.
“`
