The Widow’s Lament in Ebony Woods
A forest stands in iron silence—a cathedral built on hymn.
Its boughs are twisted chalices, its roots like serpents coiled,
And there she walks, the broken one, on soil by shadows spoiled.
Her gown, once white as innocence, now tattered by the thorns,
Trails threads of forsaken vows where every stitch was sworn.
The trees lean close to whisper names she dare not speak aloud—
A symphony of ghosts she wears, a shroud within a shroud.
Three autumns past, the leaves had blushed a sanguine, fleeting fire,
When he, with hands like summer’s warmth, had kindled her desire.
“We’ll carve our fate in elder oaks,” he vowed beneath their shade,
But words, like petals, fell and rotted where deceit was laid.
The woods had watched their promises, the wind their tender breath,
Yet secrets bloomed in hollows where the sunlight strayed to death.
A letter came, ink-stained and cold, with seals of waxen red—
A stranger’s script that bore the weight of every vow unsaid.
“He rides to wed a richer dawn,” the parchment hissed, unkind,
“His heart a merchant’s currency, your love a knot untwined.”
She clutched the page until her palms wore scars no eye could see,
And fled into the waiting arms of that dark, grieving tree.
Now twilight’s breath enfolds her as she treads the moss-stained path,
Where shadows weave their tapestries of sorrow and of wrath.
The brook, once clear with laughter’s chime, now gargles murky lies,
And owls, like judges, crown the pines with hollow, knowing cries.
“Why linger here, forsaken soul?” the elder birch demands,
Its bark a map of crevices like time’s unyielding hands.
“The world beyond this gnarled cage forgets the tears you spill—
Yet you haunt these woods, a spectral bride to love’s abandoned will.”
She pauses, fingers brushing trunks where initials once were carved,
Now scarred by lichen’s green embrace, their meanings long unstarved.
“The forest’s heart remembers what the living cast aside—
Here, every grief is evergreen,” she murmurs to the tide.
A rustle stirs the underbrush—not beast, nor wind’s faint sigh,
But memory, that fickle thief, who drapes the truth in lie.
She sees him there, or phantom’s guise, in dusk’s deceptive light,
His silhouette a dagger’s edge that splits the veil of night.
“Beloved,” croons the shadow-voice, “what madness binds you here?
The vows I spoke were smoke, dispersed when gold’s bright star drew near.
Yet see, I wear no chains of guilt—no bridegroom’s crown of thorn—
While you, my petal trampled, bleed for love’s carcass unborn.”
Her throat, a vault of unshed storms, unlocks a tempest’s scream:
“You left my soul a hollow nest, a perished, wingless dream!
These woods, my only witnesses, now cradle every tear—
Their roots shall drink my bitterness till stone outlives the year!”
The specter laughs, a sound like ice on tombstones splitting slow,
“You cling to pain as saints to faith, yet neither grants you growth.
Behold: my new-chosen, draped in silk, while you—a wraith—
Court only echoes in this realm where hope succumbs to wraith.”
He fades, a wisp of arrogance, dissolved in mocking air,
And she collapses, clawing earth with nails beyond repair.
The soil, rich with centuries of lovers’ bones and woe,
Accepts her anguish like a seed it yearns to reap and sow.
Night deepens. Bats in frenzied dance etch chaos ‘cross the moon,
While fungi glow like funeral lamps in death’s unwholesome noon.
She stumbles where the thicket chokes the path’s last, gasping thread,
And finds the clearing where they pledged—now crowned with thorns instead.
A ring of stones, moss-cloaked and cold, encloses ash-filled pit—
The remnants of a fire that once swore love’s infinite.
She kneels, her palms pressed to the scars of flames long stripped of heat,
And begs the embers’ ghosts to rise and scorch her soul’s defeat.
“O, treacherous earth,” she wails, “why nurture roots of trust
When men are storms that rend the oaks to splinters in the dust?
If hearts are but ephemeral as frost’s lace on a thorn,
Why forge them strong as iron, yet to shatter, frail, forsworn?”
The forest holds its breath. A leaf descends—a parchment brown—
Its veins the script of seasons lost, its edges worn and drowned.
She cups it, reads in silence what the sylvan scribe has penned:
“All love is borrowed from the void, and there it must ascend.”
Dawn licks the horizon’s wounds with tongues of diluted gold,
Exposing webs that glisten with the night’s withdrawn withhold.
Her eyes, twin pools of resignation, lift to meet the glare—
A verdict passed by breaking light: “You do not belong here.”
Yet where shall exiled sorrow roam when home is but a shade?
The world beyond these trees is sharp with smiles that truth evade.
She turns to stone, or so it seems, her flesh to marble veined,
As roots embrace her ankles, claiming what despair has stained.
The seasons wheel. The oaks grow tall where once her tears were shed,
Their leaves compose a lullaby for her eternal bed.
Travelers whisper of a form that melds with bark and vine—
A woman’s silhouette, entwined with ivy’s green design.
They say her eyes still glimmer when the stars neglect their posts,
Two sapphires drowned in resin, guarding love’s forgotten ghosts.
And when the autumns bleed their hues, the woods exhale her sigh—
A hymn of betrayal’s bitter fruit, where all lost lovers lie.
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