The Mariner’s Lament: A Ballad of Rain and Exile

Three winters past, when autumn’s breath grew thin,
A figure cloaked in twilight’s muted grace
Appeared as moonbeams on a violin—
Her voice, the sigh that tempests dare not chase.
“What specter walks this bridge,” she whispered low,
“Where waves below chant dirges for the drowned?”
He turned, and in her gaze beheld the glow
Of hearths he’d sailed a thousand leagues around.

“No specter,” spoke he, “but a man exiled
By tides that bind his bones to Neptune’s scorn.
My name is writ where hurricanes run wild,
A fugitive of shores both rent and worn.”
“Then let us trade our ghosts,” she gently said,
“For I am chained to earth, yet dream of seas.
My father’s house, a vault where hopes lie dead,
Its gilded bars have stripped the wind from me.”

Beneath the bridge, the river’s throaty hymn
Swelled secrets they dared etch in liquid scrolls—
How hands, though calloused, trembled touching him,
How stars dissolved to salt within their souls.
She came each eve, a shadow cloaked in mist,
Her laughter weaving ropes to moor his breath;
He spun her tales of coral kingdoms kissed
By mermaids weeping love to thwart their death.

“When spring shall gild the hawthorn’s bridal veil,”
She vowed, “I’ll flee this cage of ticking clocks.”
He palmed a shell—rose-lipped, its whispered tale
A lullaby from ocean’s deepest locks.
“Keep this where vows sleep mute beneath your breast,
Till tides return to claim what’s sworn in rain.”
Their palms aligned like shores the sea caressed,
A fleeting atlas where their worlds were sane.

But fate, that harpy with her poisoned quill,
Scrawled ruin in the ledger of their days—
Her betrothed, a lord of frost and hill,
Rode forth to claim his rights in gold arrays.
“To wed the moon,” her kinsmen spat in scorn,
“Would kindle less disgrace than this fool’s flame!
Shall seabed scum defile a rose unborn?
Prepare the feast—your tongue shall choke his name.”

Beneath the bridge where now his tears compound
The rain’s grim liturgy, he watched her led
In silks that hissed like serpents coilèd round
The dove whose wings once dared the sun’s chariot.
Her eyes, twin flares that pierced the downpour’s sheet,
Flung forth a cry no tempest could derange:
“Though chains be forged, though rogues may foul the fleet,
True north resides where tides cannot estrange!”

He leapt aboard a schooner plague-bereft,
Its timbers groaning towards the siren’s woe,
While on the bridge, her shackled hands still cleft
The storm to cast a pearl none might bestow.
Through monsoons thick with vengeance, years accrued
Like barnacles upon his rotting mast,
Till fever’s claws exhumed the interlude
When love, not exile, crowned his die-off cast.

Now waves, those ancient hags with foamy throats,
Cackle the verse he carved in brine and blood:
“Return me not to ports nor stoats afloat,
But let her bridge entomb my splintered cruse.”
And there, where rain and river merge as one,
His ghost still counts the droplets’ bitter toll—
Each bead a lifetime stolen from the sun,
Each breath a wave that drowns the compass soul.

Far off, a crone in robes of widow’s frost
Picks pearls from mud where tides gnaw at the stones.
Her lips, though mute, still trace the tempest’s cost—
Two hearts exiled to kingdoms not their own.
The shell he gave, now cracked by sorrow’s tread,
Echoes a vow the deeps refuse to keep,
While on the bridge, the rain still mourns the dead,
And love lies chained where only shadows creep.