The Forsaken Compass

No gull dared pierce that breathless air,
No kelp embraced the jagged stones;
Only the wind, in spectral moans,
Recalled the hymns of elsewhere—
Of hearths left cold, of vows unkept,
And shadows where one name had slept.

He came, this wanderer of frayed maps,
To seek what tides had sworn to hide:
A voice once pledged to walk beside
His own through tempest and collapse.
Here, on this rock, she vowed to wait,
Her love a lantern at the gate.

But seasons chew what mortals sow.
The lighthouse, cracked by lightning’s lash,
Now wore a crown of rot and ash,
Its beacon dimmed to ember-glow.
Her letters, etched in brine and years,
Had drowned in unrelenting tears.

Yet still he climbed the scree-slope path,
Each step a dirge of crumbling trust,
To find the altar of their dust—
A cairn where hope met reason’s wrath.
There, ‘midst the thistle’s thorned embrace,
Lay tokens of her vanished face:

A comb of tortoiseshell, half-eaten by rust,
A lock of hair, now dusk’s own hue,
And petals—rose, once crimson-new—
Reduced to ghosts in ochre crust.
No scroll, no plea, no faint farewell,
Just absence, thick as a burial shroud.

Then came the whisper, raw and thin,
A breeze that bore no scent of shore:
*“Forgive me—I could wait no more.”*
The words, like knives, sank deep within.
He turned, as if her shadow might
Still linger in the failing light.

But nothing stirred save waves below,
Their tongues reciting ancient screeds
Of sailors lost to their own deeds,
And hearts that trade their beats for woe.
The dusk unspooled its violet thread,
And stars, like nails, pinned down the dead.

He knelt, his palms against the earth,
As if to wring from stone some truth—
Some alibi for vanished youth,
Some proof that love outlives its birth.
The rocks replied with jagged grins:
*“All vessels crack where they begin.”*

Night draped its ermine on the dunes,
And in the black, a single spark—
Not hers, but some indifferent arc—
Mocked the marrow of his ruins.
The sea, in hymns of cold deceit,
Sang on, its belly full of feet.

Dawn found him there, a fossil form,
His eyes two pools of dried eclipse,
Salt-scabbed lips, a shattered crypt—
A monument to the unsworn storm.
No dirge was sung, no bell was tolled;
The tide, in time, would claim his mold.

Thus ends the tale, though tides still rise
To lick the cliffs’ unblinking scars,
And somewhere, under different stars,
A woman stares at shifting skies,
Her hands weighed down by borrowed gold,
Her reason bought, her story sold.

Yet in her chest, a hollow gale
Mourns the name she dared not speak.
The isle, meanwhile, does not grieve—
It breathes, vast and inhospitable,
A testament to choices made
When fear outran the vows we paid.

And so the compass, spun astray,
Points ever to that distant shore
Where none arrive, and none ignore
The price of paths we carve in gray.
Betrayal, slow and salt-embalmed,
Leaves both the lover and beloved calmed.