Echoes in the Margins

Twilight Keepers

When the sun dies behind the horizon,
and the world exhales its last golden breath,
they awaken;
the shadowed artisans of the night.

Black wings carve silence
through the inked sky,
each flap a whisper
of secrets older than memory.

Eyes like molten lanterns
pierce the void,
and the world beneath
trembles in their patient gaze.

They hang in cathedral hollows,
silent as tombstones,
and yet alive with the pulse
of unseen things.
Their wings brush the airlike mourning veils,
tender and terrible,
a hymn to the darkness.

Branches twist beneath the moon,
casting skeletal shadows
that dance to the rhythm
of their midnight symphony.
Mist coils around their flight,
a living fog,
an audience of ghosts unseen.

Some call them omens,
messengers of fear and death.
I call them keepers of the unseen,
dwellers of mystery,
masters of the spaces
we dare not enter.

In their flight, I see reflection:
the shadows we hide,
the truths we fear,
the power that stirs
when we embrace what lies beneath.

They drink the night
as I drink their courage,
and in their haunting,
I am reminded,
even in darkness,
even among shadows,
there is grace, there is freedom, there is flight.

Each night, they return
to the hollowed vaults of the world,
to the arches of trees and forgotten towers,
their chorus echoing like whispered prayers,
to the moon,
to the stars,
to the unseen gods of night.

And I, watching, learn
to move unseen,
to embrace the dark with open arms,
to find my wings,
in places I once feared.

They are the night made flesh,
the silent, the swift, the eternal.
And in their presence,
I too become a creature of shadows,
a keeper of my own courage,
a flyer in the twilight of my own becoming.