The Exile’s Bridge
A painter kneels, his palette drowned in rain,
Where Thames’ gray tongue licks pillars stained with age
And whispers secrets only exiles gain.
His brush, a phantom trembling in his hand,
Seeks faces in the mist he once called home—
A cottage smudged in lavender and sand,
A hearth’s warm blush, now ash without a flame.
Ten winters since the crows of war had screeched
Their verdict, scattering his easel’s breath—
No patriot, but captive to his craft,
He’d traced the shadows of impending death.
They branded him a traitor to the crown
For painting tears on soldiers forged from steel,
For showing mothers clutching twilight’s gown
As trumpets bled the truths kings dare conceal.
Now rain etches its ballads on the stones,
Each droplet sings of roads he cannot tread,
While somewhere, past the fog’s unyielding moan,
A daughter sleeps, her name unsung, unread.
He carves her face in air with frozen strokes,
A ghostly portrait only rain perceives,
And wonders if the oath he never spoke
Still drifts within the willow by the eaves.
A glint—a sodden paper clenched in grime—
Emerges where the river’s cough subsides.
A letter, sealed with time’s ambiguous rime,
Unfurls its wings where hope and dread collide.
The script, a spider’s dance in faded ink,
Unspools a thread he thought forever frayed:
*“I kept your sketches near the chimney’s brink
To shield them from the frost when soldiers strayed.
*The night they marched you past our trembling gate,
I plucked the baby from her cradle’s warmth
And fled to where the cliffs confront their fate—
A smuggler’s skiff our ark through winter’s storm.
But tides, like tyrants, shift without a creed—
The waves tore her from arms too frail to fight.
I write this blind, by dawn’s reluctant bleed,
And cast it to the Thames to seek your sight.
*If ever you return to Vauxhall’s shore,
Where willows weep the songs we never sang,
Know this: I carved your name into the door
Each spring, until the wood forgot its pang.
The lawmen call me mad for clutching dust,
For hearing larks in every splintered beam,
But madness is the exile’s final trust—
To love the shadows more than substance’s gleam.”*
The river swallows every word unsaid,
The painter’s throat a vault of throttled cries.
He tears the canvas from his heart’s last thread
And lets the current claim his daughter’s eyes—
Two embers drowned where light and water war,
Their spark extinguished by the unfeeling flow.
The bridge becomes a ribcage, cold and raw,
Its arches aching with the debts they owe.
At dusk, a bargeman finds a mangled case—
Brushes entombed in mud, a cracked mahogany frame—
And hangs the final work in vacant space:
A bridge, a man, a rain that bears no name.
They say the ghostly strokes still weep at dawn,
The daughter’s face half-formed in spectral hues,
While exiles, passing, pause to kneel upon
The stones that drink the sorrows they refuse.
And in the village where the willows bend,
A cottage rots, its threshold scarred with lines—
A name erased by decades’ patient mend,
Yet deeper grown, like roots no storm unbinds.
The chimney, long usurped by ivy’s reign,
Guards ashes of a portrait never claimed:
A lark, its wings entangled in the chain
Of exile’s rain, forever unnamed, untamed.
“`
