Melancholy it whispers
like a dry wind in drought.

Such a cry arose and lightly filled that summer noon,
and gods to them looked ever on to reap without a breath.
And to this day my knights do sing of all their fallen brothers
who still lie between the grass and sky while gods withdraw and hunger.

Shutting now the skies
and still more sweetly than secrets,
the night doth not fade meekly but makes warm my mind.

Phantoms whose strenuous tongues touch sweet unrest
shall taste deep shades of summer breezes,
and I shall never know
that dreary happiness that thaws my veins and clouds my fearful senses.

I am what’s left. A vessel for a name forgot. A body moving, long past the funeral.

Now I go on—not in hope, but in the quiet after weeping ends, when all is still, and grief is but the air I breathe.

If ever was there joy unchained within me, its name is stricken from my tongue. And if a song once rose unbid from my breast, the tune lies buried in some unknown grave.

There is no door. No trail through woods, no gentle soul who waits for me in dreams. That child is gone. The light has fled, and in its stead I walk, a shape, a shell, a person unwhole.

Since then I have searched. Through the dust of years, through echoes writ in ink and song, through shadows on the wall where once I cast a fleet of phantom ships. I sought some sign—a whisper, a forgotten scent, a laugh that knew not shame—and found but silence.

I felt the passing slow—a creeping frost upon the glass, drawing breath from color, light from voice. And one day I reached to touch a joy once mine, and found it gone—not turned nor changed—but empty. Void.

But that bright soul is dead. Not lost, nor veiled, but dead—cold-lain beneath the weight of days, with no stone set, no mourner but myself.