The Wilted Oak’s Lament
A forest breathes with secrets it must keep—
A cathedral of ash and silvered thorn,
Where Time, a thief, has worn the marrow worn.
Here stumbles Edwin, bent as winter’s bough,
His eyes two embers dimmed by decades’ slough,
To trace the paths where youth’s bold pulse once ran,
Now choked by moss and whispers of what began.
The trees, like sentinels of buried years,
Lean close to murmur through his failing ears:
“We know the weight that creaks within your chest,
The love you clasped—but never once confessed.”
His cane etches the soil, a trembling line,
To where the brook still hums its old design—
There, ’midst the ferns, a ghostly shape takes form,
A face he carved from memory’s relentless storm.
“Elara,” cracks the name like autumn ice,
As moonlight stitches her from air and vice:
Her hair, a cascade of the midnight’s lack,
Her eyes, twin pools where starved reflections track.
“You linger still,” he rasps, “though flesh is dust.”
Her laughter shakes the dew from moth-wing’s trust:
“I am the root that feeds on your regret,
The rhyme unsung, the dusk you can’t forget.”
They walk (or seem to walk) the haunted glade,
Two shadows pressed where light and darkness trade.
He tells her of the wife he wed in pain,
Of children reared beneath love’s porcelain chain—
“Yet none were you.” The words drip like spoiled wine.
She smiles, a leaf curled brown at edge’s line:
“You chose the road where Duty beat her drum,
Now own the hollowness such choices numb.”
A fox’s cry unstitches night’s tight seam,
As past and present blur in memory’s steam.
He sees her young—a rose denied its sun—
Pressed to his chest that fateful dusk, undone
By fathers’ wrath, by station’s rigid code,
Her fingers plucking hope’s last fraying ode.
“We might have fled—” “To starve on love’s thin broth?”
Her phantom voice cuts colder than the wroth
Of winds that snake through skeletal birch rows.
“Your heart was ever craven, as it knows.
You let me fade like mist on noon’s harsh slate,
Yet dare return to mourn at Fate’s closed gate?”
His knuckles bleed where bark has gouged his palm.
“What’s left but ghosts and grief’s embalming balm?”
“A lesson,” hisses fern and stone and stream,
“That fire untended dies to ash’s gleam.”
The hours gnaw. They speak of might-have-beens,
While owls translate their sighs to mournful greens.
At last, the east bleeds pewter through the pines.
Her form begins to fray like loosened twines.
“Stay!” Edwin claws at light’s invading blade.
“You chose your cage,” she dwindles, unswayed.
“Now rot with trinkets of your ‘noble’ path,
While I become the forest’s aftermath.”
Alone, he grips the locket, cold and trite,
That holds a curl she gave their final night.
The rusted clasp gives way. A wisp escapes—
Grey hair dissolved to dust no shape retains.
The oaks exhale. A thousand leaves descend
To shroud the corpse none left alive tend.
And somewhere, where the brook’s false laughter spills,
A sapling cracks through mold of long-dead wills—
Its roots caress a skull’s time-gnawed crown,
Its sap sings old regrets to thirsty ground.
Thus Love, delayed, becomes the poison’s bloom,
And hearts that falter feed the hungry gloom.
