The Ghost of Hawthorn Lane
where twilight lingers like a widow’s breath,
there walks a shadow—not of flesh, nor bone—
but vapor woven from the loom of death.
Her name, once sung by brooks in tender spring,
now whispered only where the willows weep,
a specter bound to some forgotten thing
that roots her soul where memories lie deep.
The cottages, with rooflines slumped and gray,
stand sentinel o’er gardens strangled wild,
where poppies bow as if to hide the way
she treads each dusk, a pale and restless child.
The lane, once bright with hawthorn’s bridal veil,
now claws the air with thorns in blackened trails.
* * *
She recalls hands—small, clay-caked, sunburned skin—
clasped tight with his behind the miller’s shed,
two conspirators of grins and sin,
who swore o’er dandelion wine they’d wed.
Young Thomas, with his eyes of storm-lit blue,
who carved her flutes from reeds the river gave,
whose laughter was a melody she knew
as sure as dawn’s first gold upon the wave.
They met where minnows danced in liquid light,
their secrets tucked in hollows of old trees,
plotted kingdoms in the amber night,
and named the stars for what they dared to be.
But borders rise where children’s dreams don’t reach—
his father’s forge demanded more than speech.
* * *
One autumn, when the crows grew bold and shrill,
she watched him shoulder what his birth decreed:
the anvil’s song, the plowhorse’s dull will,
a life etched out in sweat and sullen need.
Still, in the margins of his stolen hours,
he’d leave her rhymes pinned beneath a flint stone,
brief chronicles of fading fairy powers,
and promises that chilled her to the bone:
*“When frost has gowned the hill in crystal mail,*
*I’ll steal a horse from old MacGregor’s keep,*
*and we’ll outrace the wind to Yarrow Vale,*
*where none can find us but the stars asleep.”*
She kept that scrap till ink dissolved to ghost,
its vowels eroded by her thumb’s soft coast.
* * *
The night he meant to flee, the sky turned lead.
She waited where the crossroads split the wheat,
her heart a moth against its lantern dread,
her breath a fragile pact with fate’s deceit.
Midnight gnawed the moon to a slivered nail.
No hoofbeats sang. No shadow grew to form.
Dawn found her there, her hope a withered tale,
her cheeks outraged by tears that felt like storm.
They found him days later, the river’s prize—
hair tangled with the reeds he used to braid,
his lips still curved as if to harmonize
with currents that had hushed the serenade.
Suicide? Accident? The vicar’s drone
drowned in the forge’s unrelenting moan.
* * *
Years since, the village molders in its shame,
its young all fled, its elders half to dust.
But she remains, though no one speaks her name,
her essence tethered to that bridge of trust.
Some say she haunts the spot he last drew breath,
reaching for hands the waters long since slew,
her voice a dirge that mourns love strangled death,
her form a sigh in midnight’s silver dew.
Yet on midwinter eves, when snow lies deep,
a warmth stirs where the hawthorn brambles twine—
two shadows dance where frozen starbeams sleep,
their footsteps kindling sparks of columbine.
Brief illusion! Dawn, with ruthless blade,
severs the dream time’s mercy briefly made.
* * *
So spins the wheel till one dim, final hour
when rot consumes the last splinter of post,
when even ghosts must kneel to time’s cold power,
and every secret sinks to become frost.
The lane exhales. The specter, thin as air,
dissolves where thorns embrace the unsung prayer.
