The Soldier’s Farewell to Lemnos
Where Aegean winds carve whispers into stone,
He stood—a specter clad in tattered blue—
His shadow clawing at the island’s bones.
Lemnos, veiled in thyme and twilight’s sigh,
Had kept her vow: to cradle his return,
Though every wave that broke upon her shore
Sang dirges for the peace he could not earn.
Three springs had spilled their gold across the fields
Since last he kissed her hair, auburn as wine,
And pledged, beneath the fig tree’s knotted veil,
To carve her name in every star’s design.
But war, that raven with a hundred tongues,
Had croaked its venom through his fevered sleep,
Till even dreams grew thorns, and memory’s loom
Wove but the shroud his trembling hands would keep.
She found him where the olives drooped their grief,
Her footsteps threading through the silver grass,
A silhouette unchanged by time’s cruel math—
Yet in her eyes, the glass of parting’s glass.
“You live,” she breathed, the words a fragile hymn,
As if the air might shatter at their sound.
He turned, a statue weathered by the storm,
His voice a hollow where no hope was found:
“What grace remains to mend a broken compass?
North lies in trenches drowned by phantom screams.
These hands, which once caressed your twilight curls,
Now startle at the murmur of the streams.
I am no more the boy who swore to bloom
Where other seeds had blackened in the soil.
The man you clasp is but a borrowed cloak—
The soul within has fled its plundered coil.”
Her fingers traced the scars that mapped his throat,
Each ridge a verse in some unsung lament.
“The sea remembers what the land forgets:
Our roots are deeper than the sword’s intent.
Stay,” she pleaded, “let the sun’s slow kiss
Reclaim the warmth the cannons stole at dawn.
The cliffs still bear the marks where we conspired
To outrace time—before the world was torn.”
Through nights embroidered with the cricket’s chant,
They wandered paths where childhood’s ghosts held sway,
Past vineyards strung with grapes like amber tears,
And wells where wishes sank, too frail to stay.
But in his breast, the clockwork heart grown cold
Tick-ticked the rhythm of a discordant hymn,
While shadows, thick as unrepented sins,
Clung to his pulse, a requiem for the dim.
One dusk, beneath the cypress’ slanting crown,
She pressed a sprig of basil to his palm—
The herb she’d sown where war had scorched his name—
Its fragrance sharp as truth, its edges calm.
“You fear the love that survives fire and frost,
Yet here it stands, unyielding as the shore.
Must we be phantoms in each other’s dawns,
Or dare you grasp what peace our wounds restore?”
He watched the moon unstitch the ocean’s seam,
Its light a salve on scars he could not show.
“What peace exists for those who’ve danced with death?
Its music haunts the blood, a ceaseless throe.
I’ll not condemn your pulse to sync with mine,
A metronome forever veering wrong.
The truest mercy left for us to wield
Is to unclasp what’s lingered here too long.”
No storm erupted, nor did comets weep—
The island held its breath, the waves turned still.
She kissed his brow, a seal upon the tomb
Of all they’d buried and could never kill.
At dawn, he boarded what the tide decreed,
A silhouette erased by sun’s ascent,
While on the cliff, she clutched the wind’s false hand,
Her silence louder than the firmament.
Years later, when the gossips shook their heads
(For she had wed the lighthouse keeper’s son),
They’d muse how grief could curdle into grace,
How love’s remains might nourish what’s begun.
Yet when the north wind howled through keyhole cracks,
She’d glimpse a shadow where no shadow fell,
And taste, beneath the basil on her tongue,
The salt of vows no ocean could quell.
Far off, where foreign snows entombed his bones,
A soldier clutched a leaf long drained of green.
The frost, indifferent to the tales it kept,
Enshrined the only truth he’d ever gleaned:
That some divides no courage can adjourn,
No matter how the longing heart may swell.
The truest wounds are those no sutures reach—
The love that becomes legend fares not well.
Thus ends the tale the waves refuse to sing,
Of hearts that chose the pyre over the pyre,
Who learned too late that certain kinds of fire
Consume the very air they once called sire.
And Lemnos, cradling her scars of foam,
Still counts the beats between the shore and deep,
Where two souls, halved by duty’s cruel arithmetic,
Found hell in heaven, and heaven in the sleep.
