Beneath the Solstice

June rose not gentle, but wild and strange,
With sun too bright for dreams to hide.
The sky was gold in fevered range,
And time unspooled like a turning tide.
The world had changed—again, again—
A shimmered shell of what once grew,
Where vines now curled through steel and pain,
And dawn light cracked the heavens through.

No birdsong marked the morning’s grace,
No scent of jasmine in the heat.
Only the silence of a place
Where past and present never meet.
The days were long, the shadows thin,
And still the light felt sharp, untrue,
As if the month were forged within
Some fractured dream the earth once knew.

I walked alone, or thought I did,
Though June itself would disagree.
The wind would speak in riddles hid
Beneath the language of the sea.
It told of kingdoms scorched by flame,
Of rivers boiled and forests fled,
Of laughter lost, and none to blame
But ghosts that danced in green instead.

The trees wore leaves like shattered glass,
Each one a prism for the fire.
The ground was warm from days that pass
Too slowly, wrapped in strange desire.
At noon, the sun stood still and stared—
Unblinking god of all things wrong—
And I, beneath it, barely dared
To hum a tune, to think a song.

But deeper in the ruined bloom,
Where nature stitched the stone with grace,
I found a hidden, pulsing room
Alive with vines in soft embrace.
And there, within that temple grown,
A girl of June with amber eyes,
Held court upon a moss-wrapped throne,
And spoke as thunder split the skies.

"You're late," she said, with half a smile,
"Too long you've wandered through the heat.
But June remembers every mile,
And every soul it longs to meet."
She wore the scent of storms and flame,
Her voice both warning and release.
She did not ask me why I came—
She only asked, “Will you bring peace?”

I could not speak. I only knelt,
The weight of summers yet to come
Pressed down with truths I’d barely felt,
Like songs unsung, like bells unstrung.
And in that hush, the world stood wide—
A spinning wheel, a sword, a gate.
June offered me the other side,
But never told me what would wait.

So now I walk with fire in hand,
A child of storms, of dusk, of noon.
The road ahead is scorched and grand—
I owe my name to restless June.
And somewhere past the edge of this,
Where sun and shadow twist as one,
The end begins with just a kiss
Of summer’s wrath, and what we’ve done.

I created the images for this post with Midjourney v4.