The Cathedral’s Veil

Here, in this husk of hymns unborn, where echoes fold to dust,
She guards a love unnamed, unspoke—a rose bereft of trust.
The altar’s moth-eaten velvet bleeds its crimson to the floor,
And every dusk, she kneels as though her heart could mend the score.

He came as autumn’s ghost—a man of ash and distant flame,
His voice a lullaby of storms, his face no two nights the same.
They met where moonlight pooled like milk beneath the transept’s arch,
His fingers brushed her wrist—a spark—then darkness swallowed March.

No vows were writ, no promises carved in the clerestory’s skin,
Yet every dusk, he’d meet her there, where shadows dare begin.
They spoke in tongues of borrowed time, of secrets never sown,
While gargoyles grinned with chiseled teeth, their laughter turned to stone.

“What binds us here,” she once implored, “beneath this splintered spire?”
He smiled—a crack in midnight’s mask—and fed the dying fire:
“The world beyond these walls is naught but clocks without their hands,
While here, we are the breath between what time misunderstands.”

But dawns arrived like thieves, unkind, to steal his form away,
Leaving her with phantom warmth and crumbs of yesterday.
She wove him from the cobwebs’ lace, from incense smoke and rust,
A lover stitched from silence and the cathedral’s crumbling crust.

Years gnawed the rafters, thin and gray, as frost claimed every pane,
Till one bleak eve, the truth emerged—a wound without its stain.
She found the locket in the crypt, where ivy choked the tombs,
Its hinge agape, a hollow home for two forgotten dooms.

There, in the tarnished oval’s grasp, his face stared cold, unknown—
A stranger from some long-dead age, his name to history sown.
The dates etched sharp: *1798–1823* it read,
A life extinguished decades ere her mother’s womb was wed.

The walls inhaled. The candles choked. The rosewood pews grew tall.
She clutched the proof of love’s deceit as night began to fall.
What hands had touched this metal grave? What hearts had forged this lie?
The shadows coiled around her throat but would not deign reply.

She climbed the bell tower’s spiral throat, where bats peeled from the gloom,
Her tears the first rain in a year to breach the stonewalled womb.
The wind unstitched her raven hair, the stars blinked once, then stilled,
As somewhere deep below, the ghost she’d dreamed prepared to kill.

“You are the echo I became,” he sighed from empty air,
“A mirror for your longing, shaped from dust and desperate prayer.
I am the ache that built these walls, the grief that carves each face—
The cathedral’s oldest trick, spun from your heart’s misplaced grace.”

Her scream dissolved in leaden bells, their tongues too rusted toll,
As cobblestones, three flights below, embraced her splintered soul.
Dawn found her curled in ivy’s grip, a broken porcelain thing,
Her eyes still fixed on phantom lips, her wrists still wearing spring.

Now travelers claim, when midnight yawns and fog veils reason’s door,
A woman drifts through choking aisles, forever searching for
The shadow she called “beloved,” the dream she called her own,
In the cathedral’s granite throat—where love is bone alone.

Beneath the vaulted ribs of stone, two ghosts now walk apart:
One mortal, one a mirror made by centuries of heart.
Their fingers brush but never meet—the cruelest jest of all—
For only in the wanting can the cathedral’s veil fall.