The Marble Veil of Broken Vows
A soldier treads with splintered boots through dusk’s ashen decay.
His uniform, a parchment stained by war’s unyielding quill,
Clings to him like a second skin, half-mended, shivering still.
The cathedral breathes in whispers—its arches, lungs of frost—
Each step a muted echo of the innocence he lost.
High above, the stained glass saints in jeweled agony weep,
Their light a fractured requiem on cheeks where old wounds seep.
He remembers how she stood here, her hands like autumn’s vow,
Pale chrysanthemums trembling as she kissed his fevered brow.
“Return,” she murmured, “swear it—not to God, but to this earth.”
And he, who’d known no scripture, found his soul’s unshriven worth.
But trenches carve cathedrals too, in mud and rotted beams,
Where rats chant psalms of pestilence, and death denies all dreams.
There, in the throat of cannon-fire, he learned to clutch the lie—
That promises, like men, could rot beneath a sulfur sky.
Now phantom larks sing midnight hymns where daylight dares not roam;
The nave extends its cobwebbed arms to crush the heart’s last home.
A figure waits beside the font—not flesh, nor yet a shade—
Her presence woven from the dust that time could not persuade.
“You swore,” she sighs, her voice a thread of moonlight through a blade,
“To break no bond that grief might test, nor let devotion fade.”
He reaches, but his fingers pass through ribbons of her hair,
As through the smoke of burning fields that choked the summer air.
“I carried you,” he rasps, “in every bullet’s breathless flight—
Your name etched colder than the stars that drowned in No Man’s Land each night.
But flesh, once torn, forgets the shape of hands that stitched its pain;
The man you loved now haunts himself—a ghost sans cross or chain.”
The altar candles gutter, low as hearts beneath a shroud,
As shadows pool like liquid lead, suffocating vows once loud.
She lifts a hand—not in wrath, but as a willow mourns its bough—
“You mistook survival’s embers for the hearth we built. See now:
“This place was never sanctuary, but a mirror’s fragile face—
Your soul’s own battleground enshrined in every vaulted space.
You thought the war would claim the boy who trembled in my hold,
Yet here he dies a slower death, by truths he dared not told.”
The clangor of a distant bell devours the stifled air,
A funeral stroke for what remains of anguish laid too bare.
He sinks before the rood screen, where her phantom feet dissolve,
And presses to his crumbling lips a locket’s tarnished groove.
Inside, a curl of chestnut hair still hums her lullaby—
A relic of the man he was when love required no why.
But blood, once spilled, congeals to rust in Time’s unfeeling vault;
The locket snaps, its chain undone by tremors of the vault.
Dawn bleeds through martyred windows, painting saints in borrowed hues,
Each hue a shard of memory he can no longer refuse.
The soldier’s breath, a ragged flag, surrenders to the chill—
His eyes, two bayonets dimmed at last, stare where her voice hangs still.
And as the cathedral’s heartbeat fades to silence’s embrace,
Two shadows merge upon the stones no tears can now efface:
One real, one dreamed, both prisoners of war’s relentless law—
That oaths, like men, are but illusions the world will yet withdraw.
