The Boy Who Rose from Asphodel

He wandered like Orpheus, lyre undone,
through caverns where sorrow eclipsed the sun.
Each note he plucked was a hollow flame,
a whisper of love, a vanished name.

Persephone’s fruit stained his lips with grief,
six seeds of longing, sharp and brief.
Yet beneath the dark, a pulse remained,
a promise of spring through winter’s chain.

He pushed his stone as Sisyphus might,
but found in the struggle a hidden light.
Each climb made lighter the weight he bore,
each fall taught him to rise once more.

At Lethe’s stream, the waters spoke:
“Forget the pain, yet keep the smoke.
Memory shapes what the heart will be—
sip enough, and you’ll walk free.”

So upward he climbed, Eurydice’s kin,
but this time no shadow pulled him in.
The sun broke open, the earth grew wide,
and he carried himself to the other side.

Among the olives, their silver leaves,
Athena whispered: “A heart believes.”
His scars, once cracks in marble stone,
now gilded with gold, became his own.

He sang, not for others nor for the past,
but for the self he had found at last.
A hymn of healing, a hymn of flame,
a hymn reborn from a broken name.

And dawn was his, eternal, bright—
a boy who rose from endless night.
Through myth and shadow, loss and strife,
he learned the song that remakes his life.