Castle of Good Hope, South Africa — Black Dog
by Dawg
Beneath slate-gray clouds and battlements crowned with moss,
the Castle of Good Hope broods, carved from stone and loss.
Shadow flickers in torchlit corners, echoes in the halls,
where history breathes slow, and every whisper calls.
Footsteps ring hollow across the cobbled court,
spectral soldiers pace, still bound to ancient fort.
Night thickens in passageways, frost upon the sill,
time trapped in mortar, every minute standing still.
In the courtyard’s heart, a black dog drifts–
fur dark as new graves, movement quick as rifts.
Eyes are deep voids–hungry, patient, and old,
you glimpse him in moonlight, but your fingers find only cold.
He circles the fountain, then vanishes in mist,
his presence a question–were you touched or only kissed
by the chill of a century’s unquiet regret,
a warning that the living and the dead have never truly met?
From dungeons where chains rust in long, soundless night,
to the watchtower’s height where lost lanterns light
a parade of the haunted–soldiers, prisoners, the doomed–
all are claimed by memory, their sentences resumed.
The wind brings the weeping of those left behind,
stone absorbs sorrow, records anguish in kind.
Phantom sentries linger–at the gate, at the stair,
their orders unrescinded, their grief hanging in air.
Every night, the dog’s low growl shivers the bone,
a reminder that hope can be lost, not merely postponed.
In the heart of midnight, when silence is most profound,
the black dog passes, paws making no sound.
The Castle of Good Hope–stone, shadow, and dread–
keeps its secrets by moonlight, converses with the dead.
And somewhere, just out of sight, a black dog keeps watch,
guarding what cannot be named, in darkness untouched.