The Soldier and the Unbloomed Rose
Where ivy claws the stones of memory’s keep,
A garden sleeps—its breath a whispered lie
To those who dare to tread where shadows weep.
Here, William walked, his boots still caked with grime
Of foreign soils, of battles etched in time.
The gate, unhinged, moaned like a widow’s throat,
Its rusted teeth devouring his return.
He sought her face—the one his heart had wrote
In letters drowned in ink that grief would burn.
But Eden’s ghost now wore a thorny crown;
The roses, once aflame, had all bowed down.
Her name hung ripe, a fruit he could not taste:
*Evelyn*. The syllables, like petals, fell
In silent cadence where the dusk embraced
The hollows of the path he knew too well.
A bench of splintered oak, a sundial’s scar—
Each relic hummed the dirge of what they are.
“You came,” she said. Not as the dawn he’d dreamed,
But as a wraith in gossamer and lace,
Her cheeks the hue of lilies unredeemed
By sun, her eyes two pools of frozen grace.
The air between them thickened with the weight
Of all the words that arrived too late.
*“The garden mourns,”* she murmured, fingers tracing
The crippled stem of one unbloomed rose.
*“It knew, as I, the seasons’ slow erasing.
You left too long, and yet… the earth still grows.”*
He reached—a hand calloused by cannon’s roar—
But she withdrew, a breath from shore to shore.
“I carried you,” he pled, “in every trench,
In every star that pierced the smoke’s black shroud.
Your voice, the lantern no despair could quench.
Evelyn—my vow survives, aloud, unclouded.”
Her laughter, brittle as a robin’s bone:
*“You speak of vows, yet built your altar stone
Not here, but where the guns chant hymns of flame.
You wed the war, and I… I learned to fade.”*
The fountain choked on rainless years of shame,
Its marble nymphs now pockmarked and decayed.
She turned, her shadow stretching thin and far,
A silhouette rehearsed to play the star
In tragedies rehearsed by wiser men.
*“You see the garden, William, but not the frost
That crept beneath the soil, again, again,
While you played savior to a kingdom lost.”*
He gripped the locket cold against his breast—
Her face inside, a ghost without a grave.
*“I kept this close, through every bruise, every test.”*
*“And I,”* she sighed, *“kept seeds you could not save.
You think love thrives on absence? It devours,
Feasts on the minutes, days, the unwept hours.”*
A leaf detached—a slow, descending scream—
And settled in the space where their hands might
Have clasped, had youth not drowned in reason’s stream.
The soldier knelt, undone by twilight’s knife.
*“Command me now,”* he begged. *“Name some crusade
To prove this heart not forged in empty shade.”*
*“There is no cause,”* she said. *“The war you crave
Is done. The truce you seek? I signed it here—”*
Her palm, a map of lines the fates engrave,
Pressed to her chest. *“—when silence grew severe
As cannonade. Go, William. Let the earth
Reclaim the garden. Some loves starve at birth.”*
He lingered as the moon unspooled its thread,
Weaving her figure into night’s embrace.
The unbloomed rose, now black, let fall its head—
A corpse to mark the grave of their embrace.
Dawn found him still, a statue in the dew,
His uniform a shroud of somber blue.
They say the garden, choked in ivy’s vice,
Now bears a single rose, blood-red, each spring.
Its scent, a requiem; its bloom, the price
Of hearts that break to let the angels sing.
But William walks where poppies drench the field,
His boots still stained, his wounds forever sealed.
And far from secret groves, a letter waits—
Unopened, signed with petals long since dried.
*“I loved you through the shrapnel-shards of fate,
But gardens, like our ghosts, are truths denied.
Forgive the frost. The seeds we plant in strife
May root, yet never learn to kiss the light.”*
The sundial weeps. The nymphs, though cracked, still yearn.
The gate, ajar, whispers of might-have-been.
Somewhere, a soldier never will return.
Somewhere, a rose stays veiled in eternal green.
And twilight, ever faithful, ever kind,
Draws shadows where two souls let go, entwined.
