Where Rain and Shadows Meet
A soldier stands, his uniform a second skin of mud and memory,
His eyes two hollows where the light of Flanders fled.
Rain, relentless scribe, etches the hour’s lament in silver trails
Down cheeks carved gaunt by cannon-song and silent screams—
A face once warmed by her breath now numbed by the wind’s gray fingers.
He waits. The clockwork of his heart, though cracked, still ticks her name:
*Eleanor.* A syllable spun from honeyed threads of yesteryears,
When this same bridge, in sunlit days, had borne her laughter’s weight.
They’d carved their pledge in oak: *To meet when autumn’s third moon rises high*,
A vow split between his lips and hers, sealed by the river’s witness.
But the war, that ravenous smith, had forged his flesh to steel,
And left his soul in fragments on the barbed loom of No Man’s Land.
The rain now stitches shadow to his silhouette, a tapestry of ghosts.
He fingers the locket cold against his breast—her face behind glass,
A miniature eclipse, her smile suspended in a time before the guns.
*“Return to me,”* she’d whispered, “*as the cranes return to marshlands.*
*“I’ll wait where stones embrace the Thames, though empires crack and fall.”*
Yet here he stands, a relic of a self she once adored,
His hands (oh, how they tremble!) clutching hope like shrapnel shards.
A carriage clatters, phantom-like, through veils of London fog—
He startles, breath a ragged flag unfurled in frozen air.
But no silk slipper greets the cobbles; no gloved hand parts the mist.
Only the river’s throaty dirge, the bridge’s iron bones,
And memory, that treacherous surgeon, peeling back the scar:
Her hair, auburn as autumn’s last defiance, swept by river breeze;
Her voice, a sonnet wrapped in twilight, promising the dawn.
Three hours pass. The lamplighter’s flame bleeds weak through ashen dusk,
Each flicker a false herald of her form. The soldier sways,
His leg (that old betrayal) throbbing with the frost’s keen teeth.
He sees the boy he was, who’d knelt here, ring in hand,
Her “yes” a feather lifting him to realms no war could scorch.
What fractures now inside his chest is not the bullet’s work,
But time’s slow poison, doubt’s insidious, unspooling thread.
A child’s cry pierces the gloom—a girl, lost, drenched, and small,
Her doll clutched like a shattered saint against her chest.
He limps to her, the reflex of a man once taught to shield,
And folds his coat around her, though the cloth is thin as grief.
*“Have you seen my mother, sir? She wore a cloak like dusk.”*
He shakes his head. The words he lends her are borrowed from the grave:
*“Wait here, little one. Love returns… though sometimes it forgets the hour.”*
She vanishes, a wisp in rain’s gray psalm, and in her wake
A figure stirs—a woman’s shape, haloed by a shawl’s dark bloom.
His pulse, a wild drum, rehearses speeches rusted by the years:
*Eleanor, I kept my oath. I crossed the hell you dared not dream.*
But as she nears, the light unmasks a stranger’s weary eyes,
And hope, that final candle, drowns in night’s inexorable tide.
Midnight. The bridge now wears its shroud of frost and dereliction.
He sinks to knees that once had marched through mud and mortal fire,
The locket pressed to lips that taste of salt and stolen years.
Somewhere, a clock tolls twelve, each chime a nail in reason’s coffin.
The Thames, fattened on tears and time, murmurs its old refrain:
*“She promised, soldier. But the world is built on broken things.”*
He sees her then—not flesh, but phantom, limned in spectral glow—
Her dress the blue of June’s first dusk, her hands translucent, pale.
*“Forgive me, William. I had sworn to outlast every star.”*
Her voice, a breeze through willows, sweeps the cobbles where he kneels.
*“The fever came… they said you’d fallen… Oh, my love, I tried—”*
He reaches, but the rain unravels her like smoke,
Leaving only the locket’s chill, the bridge, the endless dark.
Dawn finds him there, a statue wept on by the thawing sky,
His eyes still fixed on where her ghost had pierced the veil between.
A constable, brusque with life, prods at his frozen side—
“Poor devil. Got a letter here… ‘To William, neath our bridge.’
The date’s three autumns past. The ink’s been bled by rain and rats.”
Inside, a lock of hair, once bright as foxes in the wheat,
Now dull as moth-wing dust, and words the war had stalled too long:
*“Come home. The doctors say I’ll see no more autumn moons…*
*Yet wait for me where stones embrace the Thames. I’ll find a way.”*
The soldier does not stir. His smile, a fragile, fleeting thing,
Escapes like steam above the lips that never spoke her elegy.
Some say the cranes that morning sang a dirge in minor key,
As two shades merged within the mist, where rain and shadows meet.
