The castle of stone arose majestically amid the hills where shadows lay,
The castle stood beneath the cloudy sky,
Its towers stretched like skeletal hands,
Grasping at clouds that shift like sands.
A mournful wind, it softly moaned,
Through broken halls and cracked old stones,
The walls were adorned with dust and time,
Once echoes of a distant chime.
The ivy crawled in twisted veins,
A silent witness to the pains,
That haunted these chambers where darkness crept,
Where secrets bled, and phantoms wept.
The moonlight spilt like liquid frost,
Illuminating souls long lost,
Their whispers drifted on chilling air,
The dead’s lament, a ghostly prayer.
In shadowed corners, eyes unseen,
Watched over things that might have been,
A shiver stirred within the night,
The stones remembered, felt, and frightened.
The floorboards groaned with every step,
As if they woke from ages slept,
spectres formed where cold mist flowed,
In passages like winding groves.
The tapestries, though moths devoured,
Portrayed some ancient, dreaded hour,
Of blood and grief and fates unknown,
Told in the silence of the stone.
Above, the clock stroke one last chime,
Its hand now stilled by death and time,
A voice that echoed through the halls,
And faded away like distant calls.
A door ajar, a flickering light,
It beckoned through the endless night,
However, none may have passed who entered whole,
Because here, the castle kept its toll.
Its chambers stretched, labyrinth mazes,
Where dawn will never pierce the haze,
And those who sought to find a way,
They went lost forever in its sway.
The ancient hearth lay cold and bare,
No fire shall ever kindle there,
But ashes held the ghosts of flame,
And laments echoed of a name.
A name once carved on marble cold,
Now weathered by the years untold,
It faded as dust on twilight’s breath,
A fleeting shadow kissed by death.
The garden’s wrought with thorns and vines,
Where roses once did twist and twine,
Now black as pitch, they drooped and died,
Beneath the starless, vacant sky.
The heart of the castle of stone beat faint and slow,
Its pulse a thrum from long ago,
A relic of a world forgotten,
Where life and death entwined and decayed.
No mortal traces stirred the chilling gloom,
The air grew stale as heavy doom,
And time itself did seem to slow,
As stone entombed, all that did grow.
In this place where darkness reigned,
The past’s despair forever stained,
And every echo, every groan,
Lived on within the castle of stone.
Esther Elizabeth Racah
