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Under the Pines

by Charlie Dreer
Chapter 1
There are tales men keep where the starwinds sweep
and the night feels older than bone.
Where the heavens lean down like a watching crown
to judge every soul that walks alone.
I walked that trail where the lanterns pale
and the cold thinks hard on sin,
And the strangest part of that frozen heart
was the voice that rose within.

I tried to write by the crooked light
of a lamp that flickered slow,
But the words turned white in the biting night
as if warned by the sky’s strange glow.
Each line I pressed on the trembling chest
of my little leather book
Vanished clean, like a thing unseen
had stolen the breath it took.

The pines bent low with a prophet’s woe,
whispering truths I feared to hear.
They said the stars weigh mortal scars
and cast their verdict clear.
Then I found him laid where the shadows prayed,
stiff as the judgment hour,
His face all numb, as if he’d come
from a climb of cosmic power.

No tale remained in his frozen veins,
no memory left to trace.
The cold had sealed whatever he’d wielded
and scrubbed him from time’s long face.
That was when I knew why my pages flew
back to blank in my shaking hands:
The story I sought was the one he brought
from a land no man commands.

I felt the sky watch my spirit try
to claim what was never mine,
And the wind grew sharp with a verdict dark
that hummed through every pine.
So I dug the snow, soft, clean, and slow,
made a cradle without a sound,
And lowered him deep where the old gods keep
those judged by the frozen ground.

My final page in the lantern’s age
turned silent, stark, and bare.
For the stars above had ruled enough
and erased what lingered there.
And I swear the snow still shifts below,
shaped by the unseen powers.
As if some court of the midnight sort
weighs every soul as ours.