The Weeping Stones of Elsinore

A woman treads the gallery, her slippers frayed by time,
Her fingers trace the portrait’s edge, now cracked like ancient rhyme.
The face that laughed in oils there, a youth with storm-lit gaze,
Has melted into whispers, lost to war’s unkindled blaze.

“Three decades past,” the rafters sigh, “you watched his steed depart,
His cloak a scarlet comet drawn to battle’s hungry heart.”
She hears the lie in every step—her own, yet not her own—
For years have grafted phantom feet to marrow, blood, and bone.

The west wing wears its rot like lace; the ballroom’s vaulted throat
Swells only with the dirge of mice through clover-choked moat.
Here, on this spot (her palm pressed flat to stone’s rheumatic chill),
He swore the stars were seeds they’d sow beyond the council’s will.

But kings command what lovers dread: the blade, the oath, the call.
His sword drank twilight’s copper hue, her name his final thrall.
No courier dared cross the fen where hope’s last ember died,
Yet still she stirs the ashen grate where supper flames once sighed.

The well, long choked with poppies, guards a secret none exhume—
A lock of hair, a parchment torn, sealed in a leaden womb.
At dusk, she kneels as nettles sting through silk long stripped to gray,
And pleads with roots to tunnel deep where his forgotten clay

Might sense her voice through worm-veined soil, through time’s insomniac crawl.
The well breathes back a hollow note, a mockery of a drawl.
Night after night, the ritual stands: one candle’s guttering tongue
Licks at the window facing north, where his ghost horse may come.

One autumn, when the fungus blooms in leprous golds and reds,
A stranger parts the briar-beard where Elsinore’s gate spreads.
His boots crunch frost like fallen vows, his cloak a pilgrim’s shroud,
And in his fist, a letter stamped with wax no sun could thaw.

She meets him in the courtyard, where the sundial’s fractured spine
Marks only hours she’s wept for seasons reason can’t define.
The seal cracks—a widow’s ear detects the death-knell’s pause—
But words are veiled in officer’s ink, bereft of mercy’s cause.

“Missing,” they write. Not dead. Not lost. A term that dares to breathe
Delusion’s nectar, drop by drop, through veins too parched to sieve.
The courier shifts, his youth a blade that flays her twilight years:
“Good madam, many share your… state. The realm is drowned in tears.”

She pays him with a locket cold, its miniature erased.
Alone, she counts the battlefields where “missing” men are graced
With graves that wives may crown with rue, while she, the court’s once-flame,
Must kneel before an altar where no sacrament breathes name.

The chambers shrink. The ceiling’s cough rains plaster on her hair.
She dines with shades: his father’s bust, his mother’s vacant chair.
A madness, soft as moth-winged snow, begins its slow descent—
She hears his spurs in rainfall’s chime, his laugh in flue’s lament.

One midnight, when the year’s last leaf clings desperate to the oak,
A figure mounts the rotting stair, each step a thunderstroke.
She knows the rhythm of his boots, the jostle of his sword—
Her mirror shows a youth still fair, her hand extends toward

A doorknob writhing iron vines… The corridor stands bare.
Only moonlight, serpentine, slips down the banister’s stair.
Yet now the dream takes deeper root: she wears her bridal gown,
Its pearls now yellowed as the teeth of hounds that guard his crown.

In the chapel, where the spider’s loom embroiders saints with dust,
She lights a taper’s trembling wick, though every sconce lies rust.
“Speak vows anew,” the shadows urge. Her lips shape “evermore,”
As windowless, the eastern sky bleeds winter’s ashen sore.

Dawn finds her prone on altar steps, her cheek pressed to the stone
That drank their mingled whispers when the world was spring’s sweet loan.
The caretaker (a hunched remorse who brings her weekly bread)
Crosses himself, retreats, and lets the living mourn the dead.

Years blur. The castle’s vertebrae collapse in slow lament.
She haunts the library, where books exhale philosophies spent.
In margins of his boyhood texts, she inks her testament—
Each “I remain” in cursive ripe with decades’ bitterment.

Then, on a eve when lilacs choke the air with funeral musk,
A child’s face floats at the grate—a trespasser’s bold dusk.
“Old ghost!” he jeers. “They say you’re cursed to love a corpse’s shade!”
Her fist smears grime across the pane. The urchin’s mirth does fade

At sight of eyes that burn like coals in flesh that starvling-thin.
“Begone!” she hisses. “This is no place where the light may win.”
But later, when the taunts ferment, she lifts a tarnished blade
To scrape her reflection from the glass, a wraith’s accolade.

The final act demands a stage: the tower where he proposed,
Its stones now loose as rotted teeth in some colossal jaw.
She climbs, each step a decade’s weight, her breath a rasping cause.

The stars, indifferent auditors, gleam through the shattered roof.
She parts the crows that nest atop his childhood desk, aloof
To ink dried hard, to quill’s last gasp still angled toward the page
Where he’d begun a letter once, erased by father’s rage.

Beneath a floorboard’s warped disguise, a casket’s iron gleam—
A soldier’s ring, a dried rose’s scream, a miniature’s last beam.
She clasps the band to breastbone where the heart still dares to beat,
Then turns toward the parapet where sky and cobblestone meet.

Wind riffles through her gossamer, a bride’s discarded veil.
Somewhere below, the moat’s green breath exhales its swampy tale.
“Tonight,” she tells the swallowing dark, “you’ll keep your promise true.
The stars are seeds we’ll plant beyond where kings may pursue.”

The crows take flight as fabric flaps, a pennant of despair.
Elsinore, in that instant, forgets how to breathe air.
Stone weeps its lichen-tears until the dawn’s gray surgeons arrive—
But she, at last, has stepped into the dream where he’s alive.