The Orphan’s Epistle Beneath the Weeping Bridge

The stones, like ancient scribes, retained
The whispers of a war’s disdain—
Each crack a map of cannon-fire,
Each moss-streaked vein a dead man’s pyre.
Here, decades prior, a soldier’s tread
Had lingered, breathless, bound for dread,
His pockets heavy with unshed goodbyes,
A letter pressed where ink would rise
To spell a truth too frail for air—
Then silence swallowed all his care.

Now, through the mist, the orphan came,
Elias, child of no man’s name,
Whose hands had known no father’s grasp,
Whose nights were tombs of unanswered gasps.
The rain, a veil of silvered thread,
Unwove the years that lay half-dead,
And there, where roots embraced the grime,
He found the script of frozen time:
A envelope, its seal still firm,
A name half-faded—*Captain Stern*—
The paper sighed as he drew near,
Its secrets trembling, raw and clear.

“To you, my son, who breathes unseen,
Whose face I’ve touched in dreams between
The bullet’s cry and midnight’s chill,
Know this: I loved you. Love you still.
But duty’s blade, which severs hearts,
Has cleft my soul in bleeding parts.
Forgive the hands that could not hold
The life your infant eyes foretold.
When rivers slow and bridges weep,
Seek me where the willows keep
Their vigil for the voices lost—
I’ll meet you there, though tempests toss.”

The boy, now ghosted by the page,
Felt decades shrink to grief’s small cage.
The bridge’s arch, a ribcage bare,
Enclosed him in its hollowed air,
And through the rain, a figure stepped—
A specter from where memory slept,
His uniform a shroud of gray,
His eyes the hue of parting day.
“Elias,” murmured shadowed lips,
“The war… it grips like eclipse.
I wrote those words in trenches deep,
Where hope lay mangled, love asleep.
But death, my son, is not the end—
It’s but the hand that cannot mend.”

They stood as mirrors, split by years,
One drowned in tears, the other’s tears
Still falling fresh from heaven’s vault,
Each drop a psalm, each pause a fault.
“Why leave me nameless, father?” cried
The boy, his voice the wind’s denied.
“Why let the world forget my face?”
The ghost replied, “In war’s embrace,
No names endure—only the weight
Of unsung souls who whisper late.
This bridge, my pyre, your cradle’s dirge,
Is where our fractured histories merge.”

A shudder gripped the trembling earth,
The river roared, denying mirth,
And in the chaos, boy and shade
Clasped hands where light and dark delayed.
“Stay,” begged Elias, “teach me how
To bear the silence here and now.”
But soldiers fade where truths take root—
The ghost dissolved like plundered loot,
His final breath a murmured strain:
“The letter… holds what wars retain.”

Alone again, the orphan knelt,
The rain now chains of ice he felt.
He read the words once more, aloud—
Each syllable a shroud unplowed—
Till dawn’s first blush, a timid thief,
Crept slow to steal the bridge’s grief.
But as he turned to leave the stone,
A shot rang sharp, a century-grown
Echo of the battle’s wrath
That split the air in aftermath.

He fell, the letter clutched in fist,
A scarlet bloom on shattered mist.
The bridge, now keeper of two ghosts,
Etched their tale in spectral posts,
While somewhere, past the veil of rain,
A father wept his son’s true name.

Years later, when the war had ceased,
And poppies danced where pain had leased,
A traveler found the letter’s trace,
Its ink still fresh with love’s embrace.
But none could name the boy who fell,
His story lost to time’s cruel spell—
Save the bridge, whose stones still sigh
The night an orphan learned to die.