you are the poem wildflowers write to spring
The moonlight is embracing her, as she parts from the crowds and weaves her way over to him on legs that seem to know only how to dance, even when walking. I prayed for feathers every night as a child, she tells him when she draws close enough to whisper in the fragile space separating them. A ghost of a smile crosses his face, quick as lightning. But ocean girls are not made for the sky.
“Neither am I.”
He had been made for the earth, for the roots tangled deep in the forest and the flowers filling all the empty spaces. He had never known what the wind tasted like above the canopy, had only watched as it carried petals, and leaves, and feathers, and other whisper-light things to places he would never reach. No, when the gods made him, surely they had joked about the irony of giving an earth-bound creature wings he could never use.
Why do you look sad? she continues, and he can feel her gaze as it sweeps across her face. He wonders what she sees there, what others see when they look upon him. He wonders if they still see the orphan boy’s hope, staring hungrily from the hollows of his cheeks - but he fears they see the creased brows of a weary king, bowed beneath the weight of a crown he thought he was ready for.
He tips his head back to study the arch again, each spire, each stained glass cutting sharp and bright and new. It takes the light of the moon, the light of the bonfires, and makes them its own. Ipomoea knows he should feel relief when he looks upon it, and hope for brighter tomorrows; and he thinks perhaps he does, somewhere down in the bottom of his heart. But it is buried beneath the heat of dragon-fire and the screams of dying things.
A promise of change did not bring the dead back to life. It did not right the wrongs already made.
“The way you dance does not look sad,” he tells her, his voice as soft now as the wind whispering against the stained glass windows. Ipomoea knows one does not need to look sad to be sad - and that, to him, wondering how many smiles hid a soul as tired as his own, is reason enough to mourn tonight.
He turns his head back to her, as the lights shift and send fractals of color dancing across her skin. He could almost smile, if it were not for the shifting of the earth, and the aching of his heart that turns over restlessly with it.
“This used to be a graveyard,” the words sound hollow, because what he does not say is the bodies are still here, buried beneath ash, bones tangled in roots -
I can hear them groaning.
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