The Cathedral’s Unanswered Hymn

The nave extends its ashen throat, a throat that cannot sing,
While moonlit panes, like scripture wrote, their fractured glories fling
On altars choked with ivy’s grief and candlesticks of rust—
A sacrament of lost belief, a chalice filled with dust.

There, in the choir’s hollowed womb, where echoes dare not stay,
A parchment sleeps, entombed in gloom, beneath a rood’s decay.
The wind, a penitent in gray, lifts corners soft as sighs,
Revealing script, once passion’s fray, now time’s pale butterflies.

*“To you who tread the cloister’s sigh, though years may bind your gaze—
If hands unseen should lift this cry, forgive its ancient maze.
I carved these words in fever’s fire, when pulse outran the pen,
But silence was my chosen pyre… We meet as strangers then.”*

The soul, now still as leaden rain, absorbs each blackened line.
The ink, a trail of ancient pain, still wet with memory’s brine.
A name once whispered through the veils (now moth-wing thin and sere)
Unfurls—a ghost that never fails to haunt the atmosphere.

*“Recall the eve when autumn’s wrist undid her amber hair,
And every leaf a psalmist kissed the earth with dying prayer?
We stood where gargoyles clenched their spite, their jaws agape, unkind—
You vowed to hold my heart aloft, a lamp for all the blind.*

*But seasons, thieves in ermine dress, stole what we dared to keep.
The frost wove lace of emptiness; the stars forgot to weep.
I waited where the hedgerows plead, their thorns my only choir,
Till winter snapped the final thread of hope’s unspooling wire.”*

The soul’s translucent fingers trace the contours of regret,
Each curve a labyrinthine space where light and darkness met.
The cathedral breathes a colder air, its arches tense like bows—
A symphony of nowhere, everywhere, the past imposes.

*“They say the sea retains no scar, no wound from tempests borne,
Yet in these walls, each fissured star still bleeds the ache of morn.
I penned this note with hands that shook, yet sealed it with a rose—
Its petals, long since time forsook, now guard what none disclose.”*

A petal drifts—a crimson sigh—from pages sallow-skinned,
To brush the soul’s unblinking eye, where visions surge, unpinned.
A garden flares—a phantom blaze—where lovers’ shadows fused,
Now strangled by the ivy’s craze, their promises diffused.

*“The clock’s tongue tolls its hollow creed; my breath grows thin as glass.
I write to you, though doubt’s thick seed assures this won’t pass
The gate of years. Yet still I trust some dusk, some vaulted sphere,
Will bear this plea through veils of dust to hands I still revere.”*

The soul, now cleft by sorrow’s blade, emits a soundless wail—
A vibration through marble’s grade, a tremor in the veil.
It gathers up the brittle leaf, the script now scripture’s due,
And presses both against its grief, a wound no world can view.

High above, the rafters groan, a chorus of the spurned,
While through the rose window’s fractured throne, the constellations yearned.
But stars are liars, bright and old—their promises undone—
They watch the soul, its story told, yet grant it not the sun.

The hours bleed, a silent rite. The letter, frail as skin,
Disintegrates to ashen light, though words still burn within.
The soul, unbound yet chained to naught, ascends the trembling spire,
Its form a wisp of fevered thought, its essence spent desire.

At last, the dawn’s gray fingers pick the locks of leaden night.
The soul dissolves—a candlestick snuffed by indifferent light.
The cathedral keeps its stony hush, the letter’s dust at rest,
And somewhere, in the thrush’s brush, a heart beats, unconfessed.

Thus ends the tale no tongue can tell, save stones that hoard the ache.
Where love and loss parallel, eternity’s the stake.
And still, in aisles where shadows mate, a whisper dares suggest:
*“All vows are postscripts dated late… All solitudes are guest.”*