The Orphan’s Hourglass

He walks as one who seeks a phantom door,
A lintel carved from memory’s frail dust,
To find the face that haunts his voiceless nights—
A mother’s smile, dissolved to spectral rust.
The air, a symphony of crumbling things,
Sings dirges through the arches, black and lean,
While somewhere deep, the river Lethe coils,
Its silver tongue stilled by the years between.

*O labyrinth of ash!* the wind intones,
*What truth remains where every stone deceives?*
The orphan’s hands, like roots, graze moss-eaten walls,
As if the past might bleed through mortar’s sieve.
A clock tower, gutted, looms—its face a moon
Pocked by the talons of departed noons—
He climbs the stair where echoes coil and hiss,
Each step a dirge for what the hands foredoomed.

**III**
Here, in the chamber where the gears lie slain,
He finds a relic of some vanquished joy:
A music box, its melody entombed,
A dancer frozen mid her pirouette.
He winds the key—*click, click*—the rust resists,
Then gasps a tune that stutters, frail, forlorn—
A lullaby half-claimed by mold and gloom,
That splits the silence like a crown of thorns.

*“Sleep, little wanderer, the stars are blind…”*
The notes collapse into a hollow rasp.
Beneath the lid, a scrap of parchment hides—
*“To my son, whose eyes mirror the dusk—*
*When the towers fall, seek the river’s pulse.*
*Where twin willows weep, dig deep, dig well.*
*But child, beware the weight of yester’s veil—*
*Some roots drink deeper than the grave can tell.”*

**IV**
Dawn bleeds in streaks the color of bruised plums
As he descends to where the river crawls,
Its waters thick with secrets turned to scum,
A mirror tarnished by the years’ travail.
The willows, twins in grief, their branches bare,
Entwine like lovers drowned in sorrow’s trance.
With blistered hands, he digs where shadows nurse
The frost-veiled soil—*clink*—the spade strikes iron.

A lockbox, scarred, emerges from the grime,
Its hinges snarling as the lid is pried.
Inside, a doll with one glass eye aglow,
A ribbon frayed to threads of midnight’s dye,
A letter sealed with wax the hue of spleen—
*“You’ve come to ask what only ghosts may know.*
*The truth you crave is not a thing to hold,*
*But smoke that coils where mercy dared not go.*

**V**
*I left you not for want, but for the blade
That kinship draws when famine stakes its claim.*
*The well ran dry, the granary doors screamed,*
*And love, my child, starves slower than the flesh.*
*I sold my soul to spare you one moon more,*
*But guilt’s a worm that gnaws the giver’s palm.*
*Forgive the hand that set your cradle adrift*
*Upon the river’s back, so cold, so calm…”*

The orphan’s breath becomes a shattered flute.
The doll’s eye gazes, lidless, into his—
Two voids reflecting what the years erased:
A boat of reeds, a woman’s trembling kiss,
Her tears the first rain on his infant brow,
Her farewell etched in every wave’s retreat.
The box, the words, the relics of her sin—
A truth far heavier than the phantom’s weight.

**VI**
He staggers back, the city’s breath grown harsh,
Her ruins trembling as the earth concedes.
The willows thrash, their roots upripped from tombs,
The river churns the bones it once concealed.
A spire falls, a slow and graceful arc,
Its shadow slicing daylight like a scythe.
The orphan stands, the letter pressed to chest,
As mortar screams and stones renounce their myth.

*Come home*, the wind now mourns through splintered beams—
*Not here, not here, but where the lost resign.*
He climbs the rubble toward the broken clock,
Its hands still pointing to the thief of time.
The dancer’s box clutched tight, he winds it once—
The melody resumes, a fractured hymn.
Beneath the tower’s last, convulsive sigh,
He smiles as the world dissolves to hymn.

**VII**
And when the dust has settled like a shroud,
The river sighs and drinks the sun’s last coin.
No dirge is sung, no epitaph is carved—
The city’s heart now rests where all roots join.
But sometimes, when the moon is gaunt and pale,
A tune escapes the earth’s unyielding throat:
*Sleep, little wanderer, the stars are blind…*
A music box’s ghost, one note afloat.