By the crypt-mist’s breath and candle’s sigh — in the style of Poe
Set in Elmira’s Woodlawn Cemetery, this poem listens for the echoes that linger between art and afterlife. The Lady becomes both muse and mirror - a figure through whom memory, creation, and mourning converge.
In Woodlawn deep, where shadows creep
’Mid tomb and twisted vine,
A maiden sleeps while sorrow weeps
Through yew and creeping pine.
Her face - a bronze and hollowed grace -
Still stares with lifeless eyes;
A silence clings where no bell rings,
And never sun shall rise.
No name engraved, no tale to save,
She waits in rusted dress,
A cross around her throat - remote,
A hush of holiness.
The rain, it crawls down haunted walls
Of vaults grown old and tall,
And drips like tears through buried years
That none alive recall.
I wandered there in midnight air,
One storm-stirred autumn eve,
Through raven’s cry and wind’s dark lie
Where even ghosts don’t grieve.
And there she stood - of flesh or wood? -
I could not rightly say;
For bronze did weep, and eyes did keep
A soul long fled away.
Her lips were curled - not joy, not war...
But something cold and spare;
A whisper deep, from out the keep
Of time’s decaying lair.
She wore the cross, yet bore a loss
Too grim for Heaven’s shore.
I knew her then, though not from when...
We’d met in dreams before.
“Sweet child,” I said, my voice near dead,
“What holds you to this grave?”
She did not stir, but winds through her
Replied in echoing wave:
“He called me here - that poet-seer -
To lie in ink and stone.
Yet none shall speak the sorrow bleak
Of dying all alone.”
And then she wept - no tears, and yet
The rain fell just the same.
The rust had grown where once was bone,
And silence bore her name.
Now when I pass that grave of brass
In Elmira’s mournful sweep,
I feel her gaze through autumn haze -
And dream a darker sleep.
Woodlawn whispers secrets low,
Where Poe’s own shadows go.
Afterthought
I first saw her face on a gray afternoon, walking through Woodlawn with my mother not long after my father died.
The air was damp, heavy with the scent of pine and rain-wet stone. We weren’t visiting anyone we knew - just walking, quietly, the way grief sometimes asks you to move.
Her crypt stood half-hidden by ivy, the bronze darkened with age, but her expression stopped me. There was no name, only that gaze - distant, patient, sorrowful, as if she had been waiting to be seen. In that moment, I wasn’t sure if she belonged to the past or to something still unfolding.
The poem came later, but the feeling began there ... in the hush between loss and recognition, where memory and imagination first reached for one another.
GBS
2024
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