The Island of Broken Vows

The island waits—a jagged tooth in midnight’s gaping maw—
Its pines once sang him lullabies, its stones knew every flaw.
But now the wind, a whispered dirge, unravels through his cloak,
And shadows, thick as battle-smoke, cling cold to every oak.

He climbs the path where memory’s roots still clutch the crumbling ledge,
Each step a dirge for boyhood dreams drowned in the trenches’ edge.
Here, Lira waited—hair unspun from twilight’s deepest loom,
Her voice a hymn, her hands a vow to break the sea’s gray gloom.

*“Return,”* she pled, *“when cannons sleep and honor’s but a scar,
We’ll build our peace where gulls still weep above the drowned men’s spar.”*
He kissed her brow, her trembling palm, and swore by wave and wold,
*“No tide shall claim this heart of mine, no storm unclasp this hold.”*

Yet war, that ravening, faceless thief, devoured years like grain,
Its letters forged in phantom ink, its truths as thin as rain.
Rumors, like rot, seeped through the isle—*“He sleeps in Flanders’ mud,
His bones a bridge for crows to cross, his blood the poppy’s bud.”*

But Ethan lived, though half a soul still tethered to the slain,
His fingers twined with ghosts who howl in every hurricane.
He dreams of Lira—eyes two flames that lit the lighthouse’s spire,
Her laughter spun from silver tides, her rage a wildfire.

Now cresting dawn reveals the bay where fisher-boats lie maimed,
Their nets like shrouds, their sails undone, their hulls with barnacles framed.
The village, once a hymn of smoke, now chokes on silence’s pall,
Each cottage door a mouth agape, each window blind and small.

An old man squints, his face a map of furrows drawn by grief,
*“You’re late,”* he croaks, *“the storms have stripped this isle of its belief.
She waits no more beneath the thorn, nor tends the vow’s frail spark—
Go seek her where the cliffs collude to murder the moon’s arc.”*

The soldier stumbles, heart a drum that hammers truth’s bleak toll,
Past meadows strangled thistle-wise, past brooks that choke on coal.
There, on the headland’s bleeding edge, a figure stands—yet not
The girl who wove her hopes in braids, but one the years forgot.

Her hair, once black as starless voids, now streaked with sorrow’s frost,
Her eyes, two pools where tempests brood, her youth by time embossed.
*“Ethan?”* Her voice, a fractured bell, rings hollow in the gale,
*“The sea has spit you back, a ghost to salt my sorrow’s tale.”*

*“I swore,”* he gasps, *“to breach the night, to cleave through death’s dark veil—”*
*“And I,”* she cuts, *“swore life would bind me till the stars turned pale.
But vows are ropes that fray and snap when hung with too much trust—
You left, and I became the dust that settles on the just.”*

She turns—a silhouette of grief against the screaming sky,
Her hand reveals a locket cold, its chain a serpent’s eye.
*“See here? Your pledge, now rust and weight, I cast into the void—
The day they swore your ship had sunk, my hope, like yours, destroyed.”*

*“I took a hand—not love, but need—to mend this broken shore,
His name is but a breath I bear, a chain, a prison door.
Yet you, who wore the hero’s mask, now shatter what remains—
Go back to war, or leap, and let the waves absolve your stains.”*

The soldier reels, the cliffs below a maw of froth and teeth,
His soul, a leaf in hell’s own wind, his pulse a dirge beneath.
*“Then let the sea judge who betrayed, who kept the sacred oath—”*
He leaps, not toward her outstretched hand, but to the waves’ black broth.

She screams—a sound the gulls transpose to echoes lost in time,
The locket follows, arcing bright, a comet’s fleeting rhyme.
The island, ever ravenous, consumes both vow and vice,
Its freedom bought with lovers’ blood, its peace a lullaby of ice.

Years later, when the tourists stalk the ruins of the town,
They’ll pause beside a moss-choked stone where two names etch their frown.
A widow scans the horizon’s line, her cheeks with salt entwined,
And wonders why the free must bear the chains the bound unbind.

For freedom is the cruelest tide—it grants the wings to soar,
Then drowns the fledgling in the deep, where vows are ghosts ashore.
And Ethan’s bones, in Neptune’s keep, now clack a bitter tune—
*“We break to prove we once were whole; we love to be undone.”*