The Whispering Loom of Forgotten Hours

His hands, pale spiders weaving twilight’s thread,
In secret chambers of the soul have bred
Visions that blister parchment, rend the air—
Portraits of tempests no eye dares bear.
The villagers, with brows of furrowed stone,
Deem him a wraith who walks the world alone,
For in their clocks of flesh, no chime aligns
With rhythms of his labyrinthine mind.

But lo! One soul, a lass of springtide grace,
Whose laughter parts the fog like dawn’s first trace,
Dares linger where his shadowed path unfurls:
Elara, weaver of the twilight world.
Her fingers, deft as swallows on the wing,
Spin flax to gold, yet glimpse a deeper thing—
The wounds that score his canvases with fire,
The unvoiced hymns that strangle in his lyre.

Beneath the yew’s cathedral-arch they meet,
Where roots like serpents coil beneath their feet.
No words are spilled—for words are but a sieve—
Yet in her gaze, the hues of longing live.
He paints her not in pigments, but in sighs,
A constellation drowned in starless skies;
She reads the verses etched in every stroke,
The dirge of hearts too vast for mortal yoke.

Through autumn’s crucible, their bond takes root,
A rose that blooms where winter’s fang is brute.
She brings him sprigs of thyme, moon-bleached and frail,
He gifts her sketches carved in phantom shale—
A dance of shadows on a splintered floor,
A bridge of echoes spanning nevermore.
Their parlance thrives in pauses, glances sown,
A language wrought for souls already flown.

But seasons grind like millstones, fierce and cold;
The artist’s hair now silvered, hands like mold.
His eyes, twin wells where sorrow’s nectar sleeps,
Grow dimmer as the village’s vigil keeps.
Elara’s loom, once quick with vibrant thread,
Weaves slower, choked by prophecies unsaid.
Her father, blacksmith with a forge of fears,
Spies tokens of their tryst—a leaf, a tear—

And thunders forth with righteousness’s blaze:
“Shall my blood wed the curse of stranger’s ways?
His art’s a blight, a canker on our earth—
You’ll kneel at hearths that know your lineage’s worth!”
She pleads in whispers softer than the snow,
But iron bars descend, and embers glow.
The artist’s door, once cracked for twilight’s kiss,
Now barred by chains of custom’s artifice.

Years slink like wounded beasts through frost and thyme,
The hamlet shrinks, besieged by hoary rime.
Elara weds a yeoman, broad and bland,
Whose love is but a ledger, neat and planned.
Her fingers, once alight with sylvan spells,
Now ply the spindle’s yoke in domestic cells.
Yet still, at night, when all the world’s a crypt,
She steals to yew-tree’s boughs, her vigil kept—

To trace the carvings left by hands now still,
To drink the poison of undying will.
The artist, gaunt as death’s apprentice grown,
In attics scribbles truths on splintered bone.
His masterwork—a tapestry of years—
Unfurls in shades of rust and unshed tears:
A girl, a loom, a yew-tree’s clawing shade,
A love as doomed as stars in daylight frayed.

One eve, when winter gnaws the final leaf,
He staggers to the glen, beyond all grief.
Beneath the yew, he lays his folio bare—
A testament to those who dared to care.
The wind, archivist of the unconsoled,
Sweeps pages through the churchyard’s moldered hold.
Elara finds them, frozen, wan, and reads
The elegy of unsown, withered seeds:

*“O Time, thou thief who pilfers breath from clay,
Why spare these eyes to see love’s decay?
Her smile, a comet searing night’s tight chain,
Now guttered in the fog of the mundane.
Yet in this web of hours, stark and thin,
One truth remains: that beauty dwells within
The cracks we carve ‘gainst fate’s unyielding wall—
A flame, though choked, insists on being all.”*

She kneels, her tears the ink his pen once craved,
And folds the leaves where final truths are graves.
Three dawns thence, huntsmen find him cold, serene,
His fingers clutching charcoals of a queen—
A face half-drawn, a crown of yew entwined,
A portrait of the deathless left behind.
They burn his scrolls, deem madness but a mote,
And nail his door with scorn’s indifferent note.

Elara, bound to cradle, stew, and plow,
Wears years like stones lashed to a sinking prow.
Each dusk, she tends a cairn where no name rests,
And plaits her hair with thorns from yew-tree’s breasts.
The hamlet crumbles—roofs to dust descend,
Till one last spire succumbs to Time’s mute end.
Yet in the rubble, where the rats hold court,
A sketch survives, clutched in the ruin’s heart:

Two shadows merged beneath a splintered bough,
A love that was, and is, and waits…