Orpheus Poem by Paige Nielsen

Somewhere in the dark caverns of hell,
A song is playing.
The ghosts are weeping.
Someone who was once a young girl,
Fresh, innocent, maiden
Like a daisy,
Now a bitter, wiser woman,
Aches for bygone days.
A stone man cracks,
His somber demeanor topples
To the power of each note.
He’s playing a tune for his lost one,
His one,
His only,
Love, ephemeral, missing, gone.
She can’t hear him—
His heart lies shattered at the feet
Of a god.
From black and blue to purple,
Like a healing bruise,
The light transforms.
The tunnel like a coffin,
Stretching to a black infinity,
A periscope of anguish of those
Left behind.
She is silent, gray, untouchable,
As the dead so often are.
He mourns her face;
It’s too much.
He turns for just one light kiss,
One feathery caress,
To hear her say his name—
But alas, the dead are silent.
Like a cloud on the lips on a winter’s morning,
She hangs there for a moment,
Is gone.
For good this time,
Gone to pick the flowers in a field of graves,
Burying the bones she finds.
Desolate, the river makes him forget.
The ferryman smiles, a grimace of a skull.
The water is peppered with the silver coins of crossing.
The hound(s) will eat well tonight.
Carrion of the living is so hard to come by.