History of Sorts

O Albert, voice of silent graves,
You walked where ash and sorrow sleep,
A sentinel of shadowed pasts,
Where memory must learn to weep.
With ink and heart, you gave them names—
The nameless ones, the flame-consumed—
You bore their stories, not for fame,
But so no truth would be entombed.

You were no stranger to the weight
Of ghostly cries and fractured songs,
Each page you turned, a sacred gate
To right humanity’s deep wrongs.
In you, the past was not remote—
It pulsed in breath, in every word—
And through your hands, the lost still spoke,
Their whispers not just felt, but heard.

We shared the silence after dusk,
The haunted hush of yellowed files,
And found in grief a kindred trust,
A purpose forged through countless trials.
Your laughter, brief as breaking light,
Could pierce the dusk of endless pain—
You knew that even in the night,
Some grace, some spark must still remain.

Now death has come—no gas, no fire—
But sleep, a gentler, closing door.
Yet I, who walked with you through mire,
Now walk those archives one friend short.
But Albert, still I feel your soul
Within the names we swore to save—
A flame inside a crumbling scroll,
A rose upon a massless grave.

So rest, my friend, your vigil done—
The pages turn because you cared.
And when I write beneath the sun,
It’s you who keeps my spirit spared.
In every line, in every truth
That still resists the silence near—
I speak, and in that voice, your proof—
Your heart, your fire, still echo here.