The Cathedral’s Sigh: A Lament in Leaden Glass
Where shadows kneel as penitents in gray,
A figure bends, his whispers cold and lone,
To sketch the light that stained glass saints array.
His charcoal stains the page like midnight’s breath,
Each stroke a plea to saints who guard the dead,
For here, where Time itself seems chained to Death,
His soul pours forth in shades of doubt and dread.
Three winters past, when frost adorned the spire,
He met her where the votive candles wept—
A pilgrim clad in silence, strange attire,
Whose eyes held worlds the artist’s hand had swept.
“What ghosts,” she murmured, “haunt your restless line?
These forms you chase—are they your joy or gall?”
He turned, and in her gaze beheld a sign,
A mirrored ache no mortal tongue could thrall.
“I carve the light that flees from mortal hands,
The transient blush of dusk on marble cold.
My art’s a wound that neither heals nor bands,
A thirst for truths too fierce to clutch or hold.”
She smiled, and in that curve of twilight born,
He saw the answer to his lifelong hymn—
A kindred flame, though tempest-torn and worn,
That leapt to meet his dim, persistent glim.
They vowed beneath the rose window’s glow,
Where martyrs bled in panes of crimson fire,
To bind their hearts where neither wind nor snow
Could quench the spark no earthly law could sire.
“Return,” she pledged, “when springtide clothes the plain,
And I shall bear the key to your soul’s keep.
Wait here, where arch and anthem still sustain
The echoes of the promises we reap.”
He waited. Oh, how waited! Dawns dissolved
To dusk, the cathedral’s lungs drew breath and sighed,
While through the nave, the artist’s resolve
Grew gaunt as gargoyles scowling at his side.
He painted her in every shifting hue—
As Magdalene in alabaster woe,
As Ruth amid the alien barley’s dew,
Her face a psalm no congregation know.
Yet seasons fled like thieves, and no footfall
Disturbed the dust where hope’s last petal lay.
The west wind moaned through columns, lean and tall,
And stripped the oaks of their green finery.
One eve, as winter’s fang bit deep and keen,
A stranger came, his cloak with rime encased,
And thrust a scroll, its seal of sable sheen,
Into the artist’s palm, then fled in haste.
The parchment cracked, a sound like dead leaves’ bones,
Revealing script that swam before his sight:
“She bids you read these words, though blood and groans
Have choked the voice that pledged eternal light.
For Fate, that chessman-mover blind and brusque,
Has crowned her queen of sorrow’s stark domain.
Seek not the why—her heart is bitter musk,
Her vow dissolved like salt in acid rain.”
No signature, no lock of hair, no trace
Of her once-vivid essence—naught but ink.
The artist stared into the vacant space
Where love had stood, now teetering on the brink.
He climbed the spiraled stairs to dizzy heights,
Where bells hung mute beneath a shawled moon,
And viewed the world—a chessboard of white nights,
Each square a lie, each move a shattered tune.
There, in the belfry’s throat, he spied a shape—
A canvas veiled, its corners frayed with age.
He tore the cloth, and lo! His breath escaped
As if a seraph’s sword had pierced his cage.
Her face stared back, but not as memory kept—
Eyes hollowed by some unimagined grief,
Lips parted in a cry forever slept,
A portrait signed by Death, the burglar-chief.
Beneath, a label, gilt now dull with years:
“Unknown Artist’s Masterwork, circa 1543.
Note how the subject’s anguish rends the spheres,
A timeless wail against mortality.”
He clutched his chest, where heartbeat once held sway,
And understood the jest the heavens hurled:
His soul had loved across the centuries’ sway,
Her flesh a ghost, his art the fleeting world.
Down, down he stumbled, through the nave’s long throat,
Past altars where their whispers once had twined,
To collapse before the tomb’s engravéd note
That read, “Here Lies She Who Outlived Mankind.”
The dates carved there—his own birth year aligned
With hers, three hundred winters prior.
In madness’ lucid grip, he saw designed
The loop eternal, love’s forbidden pyre.
At midnight’s stroke, when moonbeams sliced the gloom,
He lit a pyre of canvas, brush, and thread.
The flames licked up like Judas’s final bloom,
Consuming every dream her absence bred.
As smoke curled ‘round the saints in ashen shrouds,
He stepped into the conflagration’s core,
Embracing thus the only truth allowed—
That some hearts beat a century too late, no more.
Now travelers claim, when autumn’s grief runs deep,
Two shadows pace the cloisters, wan and thin.
One sketches light no waking eye may keep,
One whispers vows that neither can begin.
The cathedral keeps their chronicle in stone,
Where ivy crawls like unblinking green eyes,
And in the rose window’s blood-dark throne,
A crack splits Mary’s palm—a silent cry.
