Haunted

“Haunted”

My heart is heavy with burdens
I wish had never been mine.
My soul is weary, and older than I:
How it found this body as a shadow to me
Is the answer of what never can be.

Alas! I taste the sleeping light.
It must be the blood of the moon.
Smoke fills the skies and whispers
In silken snow the voices of ash.
But these fires, they burned long ago,
I have forgotten the dawn of the flames
Of that winter beneath the iron trees.
Yet still I live among the wilted bones
While the petals wither like memories
Of haunted things I beg not to recall
Should there be another yesterday
When I despair to remember them all,
As the sky fades from blue into grey.

O! What once shone in the valley
Of youth that longed too soon to die!
To see the leaves turning beyond the spring,
Reaching a Heaven that bled without a sky
As the ruins of my tomorrows lay burning,
For what was to come was a grim goodbye
As one whose soul lay in suffering
Looked with a shadow in his eye
Where once was such light as may sing
The shattered odes of a lullaby
As I lay beside him, forever sleeping.

I prepared a red bouquet of embers—
To bring to a grave without flowers.
No page yet written remembers
What is buried at this tomb of ours.
My heart is sore with the memory
That perhaps is not mine alone—
The dead I never could bury
Below the unmarked stone.
The confession made to my tears:
A stigmata that never can save
Me from the god who hears
From dreams within this grave.

© 2022 Marten Hoyle