When Silence Wept

"Ashen Bells of London"

The streets are soaked in death's forgotten breath,
A silence thick with rot, the stench of death.
The bell tolls once, and thrice, and yet again,
Each sound a dirge for yet another man.

In London's veins, the plague creeps slow but sure,
A sickness that no prayer can endure.
The sky grows heavy, stained with ash and smoke,
And hope, once bright, is now a cruel joke.

I tread through corpses piled like broken clay,
Their hollow faces frozen in decay.
No graves remain, just pits that swallow whole
The bodies stripped of life, and now, of soul.

A blackened swell beneath my skin takes hold,
Each breath a gamble, every cough grown cold.
My neighbors die behind their bolted doors,
Their moans a haunting echo through the floors.

The priests have fled, their words now lost in wind,
No crosses save the damned from what's within.
The church bells ring, but God is deaf and blind,
For plague is all that's left of humankind.

In market stalls, the rats feast on the dead,
Their eyes a flicker of what lies ahead.
The air is thick with fever, blood, and bile,
No one has smiled here in quite a while.

The doctors walk with masks of leathered beak,
Yet they are shadows-death is what they seek.
Their hollow eyes peer out from plague-slicked streets,
A vision twisted, where no mercy greets.

The sun hangs limp, a copper stain on high,
It warms no skin, nor dries the endless cry.
For nights are long and endless, marked by screams,
The plague has come to shred apart our dreams.

And I-what am I but a rotting shell?
A living corpse within this earthly hell.
Each cough I choke is met with bloody foam,
And yet, I walk, though I am not my own.

My wife, my child, they fell days past, I think,
Or was it weeks? Time flows like poisoned ink.
I buried them beneath a nameless stone,
Now I await to join them, all alone.

The church doors creak, the priest no longer prays,
The altar cold, a feast for flies these days.
And still, I wander, caught between the fray,
A ghost among the dying, gone astray.

The dead they pile, the living soon to join,
And all that's left is flesh that death will coin.
No more the cries, no more the pleading breath-
England's throne is now the plague of death.