The Cathedral’s Weeping Stones

Here Time suspends its gold-rimmed hourglass
To watch this wraith in threadbare velvet move,
His hands, pale moths, caress the carven saints
Whose eyes rain down their petrified compassion.
“O walls,” he sighs, “that hoard the twilight’s psalm,
Lend me the key to chambers sealed by years—
There lies a face behind the cataract
Of yesterdays that flood my throat like gall.”

The rose window bleeds its fractured hues
Across his brow—a crown of splintered dawns—
As from the triforium’s veiled throat
There drifts a voice no living soul could shape:
“Child of ink and ache, what would you rend
From Death’s own ledger? Every scratched-out name
Sings here eternal in the plaster’s grip,
Their breath dissolved to mortar’s bitter salt.”

Yet still he kneels where moonbeams carve their road,
Unfolding from his breast a parchment scarred
With verses scorched by unshed tears’ hot tide—
A palimpsest of summers turned to ash.
“I’ll bargain with the spiders for their art
To spin again the sunlit afternoons
When her laughter wove through lilac-laden air
Before the silence came to stitch her shroud.”

The cathedral’s heart, a pendulum grown still,
Quakes as he presses palms to frigid tiles
Where ghostly feet have worn the grout to grooves
That spiral downward to Time’s rootless core.
A chalice glints where altar’s shadow breeds—
Not gold, but ice that burns with stolen fire—
He drinks the dregs of all elapsed Julys
And sees the past rise spectral through the haze…

* * *

Behold—the transept blooms with phantom light!
There spins the carousel of lost delights:
Her hair unravels midnight’s deepest dye,
Her hands compose the wind’s most tender score.
“Beloved echo, stay!” he rasps, but she
Retreats through arches built of melting snow,
Her form dissolving into motes that dance
Like fireflies trapped in honey’s amber womb.

Three times he chases through the nave’s long throat,
Three times the triforium laughs its hollow gust,
Three times he claws at frescoes peeling slow
To touch the warmth beneath their plaster skin.
At last he crumples where the crypts begin,
His fingers scoring epitaphs in dust
That swirl like souls denied their rest’s reprieve—
“What hell is this, to glimpse through Time’s clenched fist?”

Then from the gloom where even rats abstain,
A figure steps with gait of rusted chains—
Not priest nor prince, but Time’s own castaway,
His face a map of roads no traveler treads.
“Foolish scribbler of transient things,” he croons,
“You’ve drunk from Lethe’s spring turned backward flow—
Each stolen draught shall carve your youth to bone,
Each memory grasped will wither in your hold.”

The poet’s eyes, twin wells where hope drowns mute,
Lift to the vaulted blackness stretched above:
“Then take what’s left—this flesh, these jaded rhymes—
But grant me one true hour of what’s been lost!”
The stranger’s laugh shakes candles into waxen blood
That crawls down saints’ cheeks in mock lament:
“Your plea amuses, so I’ll grant this boon—
Become my cathedral’s newest ornament.”

* * *

Dawn breaks its yolk upon the western face
To find the nave now holds a stranger’s grace—
Where once a poet raged against the years,
A statue kneels, its features worn to rain.
Its hands clutch empty air in vain pursuit,
Its mouth a chasm where no scream resides,
While through its chest a crack admits the light
That paints the floor with shards of broken rose.

The verger, sweeping ash from votive trays,
Marks how the new saint’s plinth bears no engraved date—
Only these words wind through the marble’s veins:
“Here lies the heart that loved the setting sun.”
Some claim at evensong, when shadows wed
The last gold sigh of daylight’s doomed affair,
The statue’s lips part in a whispered vow
That makes the candles gutter in their grief…

Now come, you pilgrims clutching dried-up dreams,
And press your ears to Time’s cold cheekbone here—
Beneath the hum of flies and murmured prayers,
There thrums a verse no mortal hand transcribed:
The endless hymn of moments snatched too soon,
The ballad of the clocks’ relentless march,
The ode to all that yearns against the chains
Of days that drown like sand in reason’s glass.

And in the choir loft, a single book
Lays open where the poet’s ghost still reads—
Its pages blank as futures yet unspooled,
Its binding cracked like promises unmade.
The wind turns leaves that bear no trace of ink,
Yet still the air grows thick with unsung lines
That coil like smoke from memory’s censer swung—
A liturgy of loss in every tongue.

* * *

Seasons now waltz through unrepentant doors—
The statue’s brow collects the moss of years,
Its stony tears erode the tiles below
To channels where the mice now stage their wars.
The verger’s bones have joined the crypt’s cold choir,
New candles weep where old ones left their stains,
Yet still the rose window’s fractured gaze
Casts colored ghosts that clutch at passing souls.

And sometimes, when the midnight Mass concludes
With silence thicker than the priest’s last breath,
A shadow lingers by the poet’s form—
A woman shaped of smoke and fading chords.
She rests her palm where his stone heart once beat
And hums a lullaby the walls absorb
To store with other relics Time discards—
Love’s final syllable, too sweet to keep.

Thus stands the cathedral, keeper of the pact
Between the desperate and eternity’s embrace,
Its stones now heavy with embedded cries
That mortals name as “echoes” in their haste.
But come, lean close—that statue’s jagged breath
Still rasps the question through its marble lungs:
“What price would you pay to outrace the sun?”
Beware, lest you become the next refrain…