In the shadow of the colossal sphere, where ancient echoes sleep,
Vaeloria fades into the dark, a secret it must keep.
The watchers put their scopes away, the screens fade out to grey,
As morning calls the busy streets to meet another day.
No scholar marks the turning tide, no profit in the view,
For men forget the distant stars to chase what is brand new.
They walk through cities built of glass, untroubled, blind, and proud,
Unknowing that the selfsame veil is gathering like a cloud.
The rot that choked the Aethel Sea now crawls along their strand,
An unremembered resonance that slips across the land.
As silent as the giant orb that hid the world before,
The shadow comes to take their home, and lock them in its lore.
Shadow Man
Sitting in an empty room.
He watches down the hall.
As shadows move across the floor.
And dance along the wall.
His eyes grow darker like the room.
Cause to him it’s all the same.
Rejected by the light of day
the shadows call his name.
Sitting in the darkened room,
Where nighttime never ends.
He don’t seem to mind at all.
The shadows are his friends.
He listens to the whispers.
Carried in the nighttime air.
As shadows repeat secrets.
That someone dared to share.
Be careful what you say or do.
It’s part of a greater plan.
The secrets told that he may hold
the one called Shadow Man.
Edwin C Hofert
The King of Terrors comes not with
a sudden roar, but as a quiet shadow falling across the final door.
He sits upon no mortal throne,
A quiet shadow, vast and lone,
On silent, unreturning wing.
The pulse grows slow, the candle
dims,
The noisy world begins to fade,
A quiet stilled through all the limbs,
A quiet peace within the shade.
They call him dread, they call him
night,
The final end of earthly tears,
Yet past the gloom there waits the
light,
Beyond the king of all our fears.
In the shadow of grief,
shattered hearts live
In the shadow of grief,
families suffer
In the shadow of grief,
lives explode
In the shadow of grief,
healing happens
In the shadow of grief,
lives rebuild
In the shadow of grief,
hope begins to grow
The tallow guttering upon the stone,
Casts out a dark that swallows up the room,
We learn to walk the heavy void alone.
The shadow thickens to a gilded bone,
A crushing weight that stifles in the gloom,
The tallow guttering upon the stone.
We stumble through the night we call our own,
Where blackness weaves a tight and choking loom,
We learn to walk the heavy void alone.
Yet deep within the dark where grief is sown,
The sight adjusts inside the silent tomb,
The tallow guttering upon the stone.
The blackness yields to light that has outgrown
The blinding sun that withered flower and bloom,
We learn to walk the heavy void alone.
The shadow reveals what day has failed to own,
And burning pain dispels the final doom,
The tallow guttering upon the stone,
We learn to walk the heavy void alone.
Dated: August 1, 2026
The calendar turns to August,
thick and slow,
But my screen is dark, with no
signal to show.
A silver shell sleeping
somewhere unknown,
An island of data, completely
alone.
No signal emits from its lithium
heart,
The map remains empty, tearing
hope apart.
The "Find My" command waits
suspended in time,
For a wire to wake it, a network
to climb.
But the lock is a fortress, the
boundary is deep,
The secrets inside it are safe in
their sleep.
Through the location its lost to
the shadow of fall,
The wall built of iron responds
to no call.
Miraculous ¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ stone
Against ¦¦¦ blue miraculous skies,
¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦¦ towers and turrets rise
¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ arches that enthrone
¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ wonder of the skies.
Softly ¦¦¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦
¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦¦ spreads its wings;
¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦ belfry sings.
¦¦¦¦¦¦ Ascension Day ¦¦¦¦¦
¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ shadow of those wings!
(Blackout of At Burgos by Arthur Symons)
Sometimes thin, like a cloud,
Scattered and foggy, it drifts,
Softly down or too high,
Silent mist turns to art,
Shadows grow dark and heavy,
Sunlight makes it bright and moving,
Steady shield, just a cloud like me.
When dawn arrives
my shadow rises before I do,
climbing the morning wall,
as if my spirit were impatient
with my body's waking.
Sometimes it drags behind,
my soul weary from having seen too much
of the world’s suffering.
Yet in the hour when the sky
spills its molten gold across the earth,
my shadow grows vast...
like some celestial titan
cast from my small frame,
as though the universe remembers
what I once was
before I was made mortal.
Shadows, how they fall
In distances, from the walls
And the citadels, that they had built for all of us.
And from our ancestors to our ash
None of this will to will, will last
As we again do cast, shadows to the north of I, and shadows to the south, of some lost and lonely self,
Lost in straw; and imagining,
At what made shadows and what will Gods, and what the demons that will wait to pounce upon the fools, at the gate.
And loss to lost, and the record of our loss will fall to shadows
Distant and receding
To shores undreamt and conceding
To the dreamers of the dream, (in) dreaming.
And now by the light of some other dawn, come the shadows standing tall,
Like watcher's watching all of us,
From some n'other wall that towers over and above some other huddled, muddled mass
All lost in straw, with fevered dreams and muttered prayers;
Lost to time and lost to cares
Then forgot, and gotten caught in shadows grasp.
And shadow grasps at straw;
And shadow grasps,
Without no bones to gnaw upon
No bones to pray what for
Nor make much more
Than what it was we had to made before, remembering
The divide in us.
Still I recall,
Your warm and gentle embrace
Spring blooms no more
Your absence shadows my days
Silence flowers in my heart
waltzing to
the sweet songs your
soul sings
in the hush of
a civil twilight.
we tightly
clasp hands,
i n h a l i n g
the smooth
and gentle
melody
that guides our footsteps
through the shadows of time.
l o v e
keeps us surging forth.
The sorrow of those wandering clouds is a beautiful poem,
And your futile halt along the way is nothingness.
Your hand’s gesture is an unknowable confession,
And within civilization, your shadow is the light.
The cup that weeps, left all alone,
Is your dream.
The joy that follows behind laughter
Is your tree of solitude.
Your confession, cast beneath that starlight,
Is the fluttering butterfly of a life in the mire.
Your unfulfilled return, flying far and wide,
Is a pain that belongs to you alone.
Your unresolved grief that will not die, even in death,
Is yet another beginning for you.
- The End -
I found the first letter under my pillow,
in ink I recognized before I recognized the words
my own hand, but steadier.
Braver, somehow, in the loops of the y.
Dear diary, it began, in my handwriting,
though I keep no diary that anyone else could find.
It knew things I'd only thought at 2a.m.
It knew the name I never say out loud.
I caught it once, in the lamp-light,
bent over my desk in the shape of me,
holding a pen the way I hold a pen,
writing something I would never have the nerve to send.
I didn't stop it.
I think some part of me left the desk lamp on
on purpose, that night
some part of me that wanted to be spoken for.
It signs my name better than I do now.
No hesitation in the final stroke.
No crossing out. No starting over.
Just my name, sent, sealed, and meant.
Last week I found the final letter,
already folded, already addressed
to the one person I never worked up the courage to tell.
At the bottom, in handwriting identical to mine, it said:
I am you, but the part of you that stopped waiting.
I hope you don't mind. I already dropped it in the mailbox.
By the time you read this,
it will already be theirs.
A shadow follows me around,
And stretches long across
the ground.
It jumps when I jump in the
air,
And sits beside me on my
chair,
But never makes a single
sound.
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