The Whisper of Echoes and the Crackle of Ash by Alves Dos Santos

The sun leans upon the horizon, casting ever finer shadows,
reminding us that even the mighty sun bows to reality
And we walk the line of that same memory, hollowed within,
through fleeting fragments of a life as lived as it was lost,
victims of a world that held us close, then scattered us like cold frost

Yes, once we were submerged in hours
that whispered like echoes, crackled like ashes,
each pulse a heartbeat, each breath a precipice,
and altogether, they formed vast, fiery days,
branded raw and full upon our souls

It’s not fair, they say, to keep such a retinue of silent ghosts,
even if we still feel them clinging to our skin
Love, they teach us, should heal, or at least mend,
yet here we are, sensing the end of this thread
that has no further to stretch

 

And still, I remain, like fire beneath the ice,
a breath away from the life we gathered,
where you touched far deeper than skin,
to pain beneath bone, to the ether’s essence, the distant shore

Am I bound to shadows, steeped in light and chill?
A relic, a treasure, a retold tale—
but the pages turn, fingers bleed,
and truth seeps into the cracks that time delivers

This life demands our fleetingness, to break down and part,
to shed layers like snow from a long winter,
yet some wounds refuse the balm of night; instead,
they rise in darkness, emboldened by the absence of light

How cruel is love’s hold,
marking its trace, sculpting and shaping,
stretching us, challenging us, in silent decree,
to remember the lost, but never free

They call it fate, name it the decline of dreams,
but there we are, shadows cast in the day’s waning light,
walking the path of what was, of what is—
haunted, at our very core, by an unexpected touch
that, for a single, fleeting moment, became eternity