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Across The Wall

A boy ran from the town into the stuck cold night.

They said he disappeared, melted into the frost.

Vanished like smoke when the full moon swallowed him up.

His face was never seen again,

but many years later, his bones were.


He had found final rest in a high clearing,

left sitting against a tree and staring out--staring past The Wall.

The Wall had separated his land from the rest of all land,

and it had always been there, built or not.

Across The Wall there was nothing, just the long and cold forever.


As his chest burnt with escape , he looked out at The Wall.

Across, almost lost in shadow, a quicksilver flash,

where no one and no thing should be,

he noticed something noticing him,

like a fate lost; like a soul to be found.


"Hello," he said, not more than a whisper.

The night snatched the words from his lips and returned silence.

Then. As if asking to be forgotten, he almost missed it--

soft on the wind, carried as God over The Wall,

and like a symphony in a second: "Hello."


In that hollow pitch, between only themselves,

they spoke and laughed and said things they never had.

"Who built this wall?"

"You did."

"I thought you did."


The sun stayed down while they breathed into each other,

yet the tundras thawed in their evermore night.

The world bloomed unseen in the shadows around them

while they continued to speak and speak,

both too afraid to move and too afraid to move closer.


Then, the black above began to itself crack

and the other said "I must go, but I will return,"

"To here?"

"To you." Even from far off, he saw the smile.

He promised he would wait. And he did.


He quietly sat under a tree in the clearing,

Looking past all things to where his dreams would return,

Over The Wall,

Beyond himself,

And he didn’t move again until they buried him.

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