The Orphan’s Lament: A Dirge in Shadowed Woods

“O spectral grove,” he cries, “whose bones confine
The secrets nursed by time’s unfeeling breast,
Reveal the truth this orphaned heart calls mine,
Though thorn and shadow bar the soul’s unrest!”
No answer comes but echoes, faint and cold,
That dance like moths about a guttering flame,
Yet still he presses through the bracken old,
Led by a love no mortal voice may name.

Three nights he roamed where faerie-fires glowed,
Their emerald tongues licking the loam’s black skin;
Three dawns he watched the weeping willows bowed,
Their leaves like tears shed for a world’s lost sin.
At last, beneath a cairn of moss-stained stone,
He spied a shape—a wraith in silver dressed—
Her hair a flood of moonlight finely spun,
Her eyes twin pools where sorrow made its nest.

“What phantom art thou,” quoth the trembling boy,
“That haunts these woods with footsteps soft as death?”
Her voice, a breeze through reeds, breathed forth no joy:
“I am the echo of thy own life’s breath.
The past thou seek’st in vain to clasp anew
Lies not in glen nor crypt nor starless deep—
For time, once fled, no mortal may pursue;
Even memories fade when dreamers sleep.”

Yet still he pled, his hands in suppliance raised:
“If thou art kin to shadows I hold dear,
Unseal the vault where yesteryears are praised!
Let me but glimpse the faces vanished here.”
The spectre wept—her tears like liquid pearl—
“Poor child, the door thou knock’st on hath no key.
To grasp at ghosts doth but the spirit whirl
In endless night, where neither shore nor tree—”

He clutched her robe, its threads like cobweb frail,
“Then take me hence to dwell where thou dost roam!
Without the past, my present is but jail,
And all tomorrows barren as this loam.”
She faded then, a sigh in twilight born,
Her form dissolving into motes of light,
While through the trees there crept the muted horn
Of some far hunt, unseen within the night.

Madness now gnawed his reason’s frayèd thread;
He chased each will-o’-wisp that mocked his grief,
Scourged briars rending flesh till he bled
A crimson path through thicket, stone, and leaf.
At twilight’s brink, he stumbled into a glade
Where stood a cottage, rotten to its core—
Its thatch slumped low, its timbers decayed,
A spectre of the home he’d sought before.

Within, the hearth lay cold, the table set
With plates of dust and goblets long since drained.
A child’s toy horse, one wheel forever fret,
Upon the mantel, mute anguish retained.
Here, then, the truth burst like a storm’s cruel whip:
These crumbling walls had once embraced his sleep;
This ruin, where the rats now gnaw and sip,
Cradled his cradle… ere the world grew steep.

Outside, the ground gave way beneath his feet—
A yawning grave where family bones embraced.
No stone marked those whose names once rang so sweet,
Only the worms that writhe in endless haste.
He sank beside the pit, his tears like lead,
“O stolen kin, why was I left behind?
To wander lone ’midst living and the dead,
A leaf torn loose by fate’s unkind wind?”

The stars blinked cold, the oaks stood sentinel,
As frost began its slow, encroaching creep.
The boy’s last breath became a faint farewell—
A mist that joined the shadows’ tender keep.
And thus they found him when the dawn broke pale:
A smile etched by death’s unerring hand,
His fingers curled around a rusted nail
Prized from the house he could not understand.

Now travellers shun that grove of whispered wrongs,
Where nettles choke the path none dare retrace.
Yet on still nights, when autumn throbs with songs,
There drifts a voice that mourns time’s cold embrace—
A duel of notes, both ache and solace spun,
That asks of every soul whom grief hath marred:
Can love outlive the flesh? Are we undone
When memory’s lamp dies, leaving no regard?

The oaks sway slow, their roots drink deep of years,
Their leaves inscribe sad psalms on bark’s dark page.
No answer comes but rain—the forest’s tears—
For mortal hearts were ne’er designed to gauge
Why fate exiles some loves to phantom shores,
Or why the past remains a locked reliquary.
Weep, then, for all whom lonely dusk restores
To dreams that glow… too late, too brief, too airy.