Author's note: Just what I feel about the archway through which Sirius disappeared. Walter de la Mare's The Listeners is a poem about a traveler who rides to a desolate house in the middle of a forest because he had promised to come. But the people he wants to meet are dead and the phantom listeners are unable to reply to his desperate calls.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own anything, Rowling does.

A gray mist hangs around the lonely unknown place

Where shadows swift and dumb their mortal forms do trace.

I know not if it's this earth or heaven or hell,

For those that find their way there have no voice to tell.

They are de la Mare's 'Listeners' who hear but nev'r speak,

And there's no return for those who go beyond the veil.