The Solitary Gardener of Silent Hours

Her hands, pale as lilies in dusk’s tender glow,
Tended the roses that only she’d know:
Crimson as secrets, thorned, yet divine,
Their petals like verses she’d scribed line by line.

Beneath the old willow, a bench bore her name,
Carved deep in its oak, now half-lost to the flame
Of years that had gnawed at the letters’ embrace,
As Time, the sly sculptor, erased every trace.

There, in that arboretum of unspoken vows,
She’d kneel by the sundial, her palm on its brows,
Counting the hours that slipped through the sieve
Of a life spent awaiting a love meant to live.

For he was a phantom, a face in the mist—
A traveler who paused where the garden paths twist,
His eyes holding galaxies, voice like the rain
That murmurs to wheat fields in summers of Spain.

They spoke through the lattice, her lips pressed to stone,
Of sonnets and starlight and worlds left unknown,
While jasmine, in reverence, bowed low to attest
The ache in her heartbeat, the weight in her chest.

But Fate, that old usurer, hoarding its gold,
Dealt hands heavy with lead, their story unsold.
He rode with the dawn, one last glance cast behind,
A silhouette swallowed by frontiers unkind.

The garden grew wilder, each blossom a dirge,
As winter crept close with its frost-laden surge.
She pruned the dead branches, her breath a faint plume,
And whispered to tulips that withered too soon.

“O, seasons,” she pled to the indifferent sky,
“Why crown me with absence, yet never ask why?
The earth may reclaim every seed I have sown,
But who shall remember the love I’ve outgrown?”

The moon, her lone confidant, charted the years,
Waxing and waning through sorrows and tears,
Till one April morning, a letter arrived—
A parchment as sallow as hopes long deprived.

No name graced the seal, yet her fingers, half-blind,
Unfurled the last chapter she’d sought but declined:
A sketch of her garden, now framed in his hand,
And three bleeding words from a faraway land.

The ink bled to nothing where his touch had been,
A requiem scripted for what might have been.
She knelt by the fountain, its waters gone still,
And felt the world fracture, then bend to her will.

The roses turned ash on their stems, black and bare,
The willows shed leaves in a grief-stricken air,
As if the whole garden, once vibrant, now knew
The truth she had buried, yet somehow foreknew.

She laid the note gently where violets had lain,
And walked through the archway of sleet and of pain,
Her shawl, a mere ghost of the silk it had been,
Trailed threads of her spirit on thorns evergreen.

At dusk, they discovered her, cold, yet serene,
Her cheek pressed to soil where no grass grew between,
A smile half-tethered to lips chalked and pale—
A moth seeking solace in light’s final veil.

The garden, now orphaned, let ivy descend
To shroud her in emerald, to mourn and to mend.
And somewhere, a nightingale, lost in its flight,
Sang one note that shattered the fabric of night.

But travelers who pass by that ruinous gate
Still speak of a presence that lingers, though late—
A woman who tends to the roses at noon,
Her voice woven into the wind’s somber tune.

They say if you linger where sundials decay,
You’ll hear her recite what the stars dare not say:
That love, unrequited, outlives its own name,
And solitude’s crown is both jewel and flame.