Wraith of the Cavern
The cavern breathes.
Its walls slick with time, with damp, with secrets.
It has seen centuries of footsteps,
but tonight, it watches.
Above, the sky stretches wide—
galaxies shifting, burning,
too far, too indifferent
to witness what he has done.
She is beneath him.
Was beneath him.
Her breath stolen, her body cooling,
the fight long gone from her limbs.
He had taken what he wanted.
More than that.
Everything.
Now, only the cavern knows.
His hands, trembling now, touch the stone.
His chest heaves.
Guilt? Regret?
No—something deeper, something worse.
And then, he screams.
The sound rips through the cavern,
tearing against rock,
splitting the silence open
like a wound.
The walls tremble.
The ground shifts.
The cavern awakens.
For a breath, it grieves.
For a breath, it remembers her.
Then, it judges.
The air thickens.
The trembling stops.
His voice is taken,
flung into the void,
cast to the stars
never to return.
This is his punishment.
Not death.
Not solitude.
But silence.
The last tether to her,
severed.
Once, she pressed her palm to his chest.
Felt the hum of breath.
The warmth of skin.
The pulse of something real.
Now—nothing.
The cavern swallows the last echo.
Above, the universe turns on,
uncaring.
And the stars—
they do not grieve for him.
Reflection:
This poem is about justice—true, raw justice. The kind that human hands often fail to deliver. He took everything from her, stripping her of dignity, of breath, of life itself. But the world, the universe, does not punish men like him. They walk free, justified by excuses, shielded by silence.
But the cavern does not forget. It listens. It knows what he has done. And so, in a world where men take and walk away unscathed, the cavern becomes the reckoning. It takes the only thing left to take—his voice, his ability to be heard, his existence as something that matters. It does what the world refuses to do.
His punishment is not death. That would be too simple, too kind. Instead, he is erased, left in a silence that mirrors the silence he forced upon her. A silence that echoes forever, but never back to him.
And the stars? The universe? They do not grieve. Because this was never about them.
This is about her.
Copyright ©
Douglas Crabtree
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