Shattered Jade at the Weeping Willow Shrine
We parted when summer’s last lotuses rotted in the stone basin—
Now snow falls like shards of jade, cutting through the grey air.
I thought I’d cracked the code your fingertips had written—
Thought those eyes, like burning cinnabar seals, pledged only to my care.
But your world is locked behind doors carved with crane and bat forms,
A tongue etched on bamboo slips I can never read.
Our words crash like rain on a coffin’s lacquered surfaces,
No ink could bridge the chasm where our fates were meant to bleed.
You swore love would endure beyond the cycle of life and dust,
Yet we never watched meteors streak the sky above the graves.
No northern lights—only frost that patterns every rust
On iron locks we forged, then broke, in fits of fever and waves.
Sometimes we spun among mist-wreathed pagoda spires,
Sometimes as cold as the moon trapped in a well and sun in fire.
So let us become strangers, no more bound by false desires—
At the shrine where weeping willows dip in frozen mire,
We’ll burn our old tokens and let the ash retire
To the dark earth, as we turn and walk through the gathering fire...🌘✨01272026 ©LanZhan
L