“Lottie Lofland and the Whispering Oak”

Lottie Lofland, skirts of grey,

Treads the moor where shadows play.

Her pocket holds a thorn-bound key,

That unlocks what the Oak can see.

The branches sigh in tongue of rain—

“Child, your dreams are not in vain:

When ravens crown the moon’s cold eye,

The clockwork stars will bleed the sky.”

She scraped her palms on bark and rhyme,

To bind her ghost to fractured time.

Now attics hum with cogs and steam,

In worlds stitched from a dying dream.