Salem, Massachusetts — Trials
by Dawg
Under the gallows’ ruin, where night refuses to forget,
Salem’s cobblestone arteries pulse with ancestral regret.
Moonlight fractures on rooftops, splintering across colonial bone,
every shadow stretches longer in a town condemned alone.
The Witch House leans on history, its timbers tight with pain,
muffled by prayers unanswered, by verdicts that remain.
Justice faltered in these alleyways, trembling under false pretense,
specters of hysteria twisting every ounce of sense.
Here, women and men–unlucky, unloved, unspared–
became legend in a fever, cursed by hands that never cared.
Judges sharpened verdicts, tongues dripping with dread,
the law a marionette, pulling strings for the dead.
Each home a silent witness, each hearth a courtroom’s spectacle,
neighbors traded accusations like currency for rage.
The wind remembers curses hurled from scaffold high,
and laughter muffled by rope, and pleading forced to die.
Footsteps falter at midnight by the old burying ground,
where lichen climbs the tombstones, where the lost are never found.
The condemned are restless–still pleading with the rain,
hoping for forgiveness that never came, never came.
The Witch House sighs with memory, each door a nervous plea,
even the air is brittle, every echo tight with grief,
the soil itself remembers the taste of disbelief.
Cemeteries cradle the restless, voices caught in stone,
the condemned recite their innocence to moss and bone.
On the wind, old whispers tangle, thick with accusation,
you leave with a piece of the gallows wound tight around your heart,
marked by the spectral symphony that never will depart.
In Salem, darkness lingers–truth and legend both confined–
where every trial echoes, and the past is never left behind.