The Soldier’s Evensong

He pauses where the nave’s long silence grows,
And hears the wind’s faint lamentation flow—
Not hymns, but echoes of the battlefield,
Where cannon roared and brotherhood was sealed.
The stained-glass saints, in hues of blood and brine,
Cast fractured light upon a faded shrine.
A marble Mary, veiled in dust, extends
Her hand, but offers neither peace nor ends.

“O hallowed walls,” he murmurs, “have you kept
The truths I left, before the world had wept?
Here knelt I once, a boy with untried hands,
And swore to guard these green and gentle lands.
But where, ah where, is that bright-hearted knight
Who dreamed of glory in the morning light?
The fields I saved are ash; the vows I bore
Are buried deep on some forgotten shore.”

A rustle stirs—not breeze, nor wing, nor rat—
But something spectral, neither flesh nor spat.
From dusky aisles, a figure cloaked in gray
Emerges, bearing night and disarray.
Her face, half-shrouded, mirrors his own woe,
Yet glows with pallor like the moonlit snow.
“You seek,” she sighs, “what time has torn away:
The self you were before the darkening day.”

“Who speaks?” he gasps, his pulse a drum of dread,
“Are you some saint, or specter of the dead?”
“I am the keeper of unwritten tales,
The breath that steams on mirrors, thin and frail.
You wander not these stones, but your own mind,
To find the thread that war’s harsh hand unbind.
Each step you take within this vaulted maze
Is but a stride through memory’s choking haze.”

He stumbles back, the walls now closing tight,
Their carvings writhing in the candlelight.
The rood-screen grimaces; the altar stone
Cries tears of wax for sins he can’t atone.
“What truth remains,” he pleads, “beneath this dome,
If all I was lies shattered, far from home?
The man I slew—his face, it haunts me still—
Was he not brother to my own doomed will?”

The wraith draws near, her voice a silver blade:
“You mourn the living more than those who fade.
That boy you were, so eager, so unmarred,
Lies not in graves, but in your bosom, charred.
No shrine can house him, nor no prayer revive—
He breathes but in the echoes you survive.
Each scar you bear, each night you drown in smoke,
Is but the price of truths you dare not spoke.”

A sudden peal—the bells, though stilled for years,
Resound as if to drown his rising tears.
The tower quakes; the rafters shed their gloom,
And ancient dust ascends like phantom bloom.
Between the clangs, a choir’s ghostly strain:
*Lamenta, lamenta*… endless pain.
He clutches at his chest, where shrapnel lies,
And feels the past’s cold fingers grip his eyes.

“Enough!” he cries, “If truth is but this void,
This yawning chasm where my hopes were destroyed,
Then let the stones consume me, bone and breath,
And weave my name into the tap’stry death.
What use is light, if all it does is show
The hollow where a heart once dared to glow?”
The specter fades, her parting words a wisp:
“The truth you seek is in the mortal gasp.”

Now moonlight spills through windows cracked and marred,
And paints his shadow on the stones, unstarred.
He crawls toward the crypt where kings repose,
Their marble brows untouched by mortal woes.
A child’s laugh echoes—his? Or some long-dead
Boy’s mirth, now chiseled into silence, lead?
He reaches out, but grasps a rusted chain,
Its links engraved with names he can’t regain.

The final candle gutters, spent, undone,
As night’s black tide devours nave and sun.
His breath grows faint; the chain, now ice, now fire,
Binds heart to crypt, to ash, to lost desire.
And as the dark reclaims its sovereign reign,
He hears the fields he failed to save again—
Not green, but scorched; not singing, but a dirge,
As truth and time into one vortex merge.

No mourners kneel where his still form now lies,
Beneath the weight of unrelenting skies.
The cathedral keeps its silence, deep and wise,
While dawn’s first light betrays his glassy eyes.
A single leaf, borne by some wayward gust,
Falls where his hand lies open, free of dust.
And in that grasp—no cross, nor sword, nor plea—
But autumn’s gold, too frail for memory.