The Exile’s Bloom: A Lament in the Garden of Shadows

Three springs have bled since fate’s unkind decree
Cast her adrift from shores her heart called home.
No trumpet marked her fall, no dirge was sung—
Only the wind’s low moan through barren halls,
The clink of chains unseen, the weight of names
Erased like chalk from slate by hands unseen.
She tends these blooms as one might tend a wound:
With trembling care, lest blood should break the soil.

“Speak to me,” she whispers to the dusk,
Her voice a frayed thread spun from midnight’s loom.
“Tell me the jasmine still recalls my tongue,
That lilacs guard the lullabies I’ve lost.”
But petals close like fists against her plea,
Their fragrance sharp with judgment or with grief—
The garden breathes in rhythms not her own,
A language etched in root and frost and thorn.

Yet here, beneath the oak’s gnarled sentinel,
A stranger kinship stirs in shadowed soil:
A sapling, frail as hope, with leaves like tears,
Unfurling where her footprints scar the moss.
Each dawn she kneels, her palms pressed to its bark,
And pours into its veins the salt of years—
Stories of courtyards where her laughter soared,
Of eyes now ash, of hands that shaped her sky.

“Grow,” she urges, “split the prison of this earth,
Unweave the gloom that binds your tender spine.
Your branches, soon, will dance in freer airs—
A testament that roots need not mean chains.”
The sapling shivers, drinking in her pain,
Its rings absorbing every unspent scream,
Until one morn it stands, not weak, but wild—
A maple crowned in fire, fierce and lone.

Autumn descends, a thief in gilded robes,
To strip the garden bare of borrowed grace.
The woman watches, gaunt as winter’s breath,
As maple leaves take flight like shattered vows.
“So this is exile’s final alchemy—”
Her words dissolve in frost. “To love a thing
That mirrors back your own fragmented form,
Then bear witness as the wind claims it whole.”

She dreams in shades of green that night—strange hues
That pulse like veins beneath a foreign sun.
A child’s voice threads the dark (“Remember, remember”),
But when she grasps, it melts to spider silk.
Dawn finds her clutching loam against her breast,
Her nails black crescents, hair a storm of gray,
While somewhere past the wall, a bell tolls once—
A sound she once knew well, now stripped of name.

The seasons turn their wheel without remorse.
The maple sheds its blaze, then dons new gold;
The roses twist their thorns in tighter coils,
And snowdrops bow like penitents in snow.
Her hands, once deft as sparrows, shake and stall,
Leaving tasks half-done—a pruning knife
Abandoned mid-cut, paths swept then reclaimed
By ivy’s patient, strangling embrace.

One evening, as the west bleeds damson light,
A figure parts the fog—a traveler,
His cloak embroidered with her homeland’s stars,
His eyes two mirrors of her stolen youth.
“Sister,” he murmurs, though the word seems rust,
“The court has… shifted. Certain truths now breathe.
Your exile’s end is writ, but comes too late—
The blight you fled now festers in your veins.”

She does not weep. (The well ran dry years hence.)
Instead, she smiles—a cracked porcelain curve—
And leads him to the maple’s sovereign shade.
“You see this tree? Its sap is my life’s ink,
Its rings the count of days I’ve mourned in silence.
Tell them I’ve carved my epitaph in bark,
That exile’s flower bears the sweetest fruit—
A poison and a nectar, sip by sip.”

He leaves at dawn, his pockets heavy with
The maple’s seeds—small urns of legacy.
She watches from the gate, her spine erect,
Until his form dissolves into the mist.
Then, slowly, as the garden holds its breath,
She walks the paths once more, each step a psalm,
And stops where snowdrops shiver in their beds—
Their petals white as bones, as farewells, as home.

That night, the frost descends with unclenched jaws.
It gnaws the roses’ throats, seals the brook’s lips,
And wraps the maple in a glassy shroud.
They find her at first light, her body curled
Beneath the tree, her cheek pressed to its roots,
A smile thawing upon her frozen face.
In her clenched palm—a single maple key,
Its wing still whole, its promise still unborn.

The garden keeps its vigil. Years unwind.
The traveler plants her seeds in foreign soil
Where saplings rise like pyres against the dusk,
Their canopies ablaze with her defiance.
But in the secret plot where shadows mate,
The roses claw through cracks in her old bones,
The maple drinks the marrow of her grief,
And walls collapse, stone by forgotten stone—
Till naught remains but wind where once she wept,
And earth that blooms, and blooms, and will not rest.