Nightingale

Mist gathering with the sparrow song,
seeping into the winter silence left
by the nightingale, even the trees bereft,
frost coating grass-blades in suits
of glass armour, and her eyes
guarded as the cloud-cloven sun,
tired, bitter-pale, a rose frozen.

A sky painted in the grey of wolf-fur,
stretched and strangled and pinned to stars
howling silent in abyss perpetual,
cloaking a pale blue dot
in the shade of a waste land,
the grave-grey of a life without her.

I gaze into the crushing ocean,
dark crypt of life and time,
mouth gaping in silent-scream,
reams of sunshine, blood, and tears streaming
through brittle air and long-warped years,
and her silhouette is swallowed,
vanished with the night’s song.

She built her walls and as winds
changed, tides receding,
all beaten shingle and salt-spray,
I forgot how to rearrange the stones,
instincts eaten in the erosion.

Our forest is all but silent now,
our wolves have long since fled,
snow smothers the hunting ground,
bright red where my heart has bled.

She said in one golden
moment shorn from darkness
that the song shored up her mind,
that the music was her northern star,
but did she ever know
that she was mine?