The Temple of Unspoken Leaves
her shadow frayed like moth-gnawed tapestry,
through groves where cypress whispered dirges low
to winds that bore no scent of bloom or brine.
The temple’s teeth—those splintered colonnades—
rose stark as ribs of some leviathan
half-swallowed by the earth’s insistent throat.
Here, said the villagers with averted eyes,
time’s river slows to stagnant silver pools,
and echoes lodge like thorns in porous stone.
She crossed the threshold where the lichen scrawled
its cryptic hymns across the architrave,
her pulse a feeble bird against her throat.
Dust motes ascended, slow as souls unbound,
through shafts of light that cut the inner gloom—
blades sheathing themselves in ancient air.
A fresco peeled itself from western walls:
faded nymphs with hands outstretched in plea,
their mouths erased by centuries of damp,
their eyes still wet with pigment’s mimic tears.
Three nights she slept beneath the broken dome,
her dreams infested with a stranger’s voice
that hummed in cadences of cracking ice.
On the fourth dusk, as autumn’s rasping breath
stirred votive ashes in their bronze-lined crypts,
he came—not as flesh, but as a warp of light,
a shimmer like the memory of flame.
His fingers, woven from the dusk’s last sigh,
traced the contours of her unasked grief,
and in his wake, the air bloomed sharp with rue.
“What specter treads these halls?” she dared demand,
her voice unspooling to a tremulous thread.
“Not ghost,” he murmured, “but the aftertaste
of choices petrified to monument.
I am the keeper of unlived tomorrows,
the curator of paths untrod by dusk,
the archivist of breaths you dared not draw.”
His form condensed—a face all angles wrought
from moonlit marble’s most afflicted strain,
eyes like twin chasms where stars go to drown.
They spoke in rhythms older than the stones,
their dialogues a dance of veiled regrets.
He showed her tableaux in the temple’s heart—
a loom where threads of might-have-beens entwined,
each strand a life she’d throttled in its crib,
each hue a love dissolved to muted gray.
“Behold,” he sighed, “the symphony unsung,
the epic poem of your silenced throat.
Each note you swallowed built these crumbling walls;
each fear you nursed carved hieroglyphs of woe.”
Beneath his gaze, her armor of resolve
melted like gilded wax before the truth.
She saw the child left wailing at the well,
the letters burned with seals still tightly clasped,
the hands unheld, the thresholds never crossed,
the self she’d buried under should and must.
The temple trembled as her keening rose—
a sound to make the dead vines clutch their roots,
a psalm of anguish raw enough to scar
the indifferent cheeks of heaven’s marble saints.
He reached for her, his palm a vortex now,
a swirl of autumn leaf and funeral ash.
“One draught from Lethe’s spring lies in my gift,
to blur these visions to a harmless mist.
Or stay, and let the crushing weight descend—
the price of sight is everlasting burn.”
She watched a spider mend its tattered web
between two columns blackened by old fires,
its patient art a testament to naught
but time’s vast hunger for all crafted things.
“I choose the pyre,” she breathed, and in that breath,
the temple sighed as if some deep chord snapped.
His form dissolved to motes of bitter myrrh
that settled on her lids like funeral shrouds.
The walls began their inexorable chant,
each stone a tongue reciting her life’s dirge,
each crack a mouth that sang of roads untraveled.
She felt her mind unravel strand by strand,
a tapestry undone by truth’s harsh claws,
her name erased from every monument.
Dawn found her prone beneath the shattered dome,
her hair now white as midwinter’s first kill,
her palms engraved with labyrinthine lines
that spelled in forgotten tongues I dared to see.
The villagers who came with wary tread
found only swallows nesting in her ribs,
her eyes two pools of pitch-black understanding,
her lips sewn shut by wisdom’s cruelest thorn.
And high above, where roof once mocked the sky,
a lone hawk circled, keening her elegy.
The temple, sated, settled in its grave,
each stone content to bear its weight of years.
Wind sifts through cracks where once her laughter died,
and somewhere, in the shadows’ shifting weave,
two voices linger—hers of ash and ache,
his of the void where unformed futures brood—
still debating choices made in sacred dark,
still trading truths too sharp for mortal throats,
still bound in that eternal waltz of pain
that none escape who dare to lift the veil.
Now travelers claim, when moon bleeds copper-red
and owls grow mute as if some pact forbids,
a woman’s form emerges from the stones,
her fingers combing threads of phantom looms,
her mouth a silent O of endless rue,
her feet still rooted to that fateful floor.
They say the very ivy turns its head,
the ancient pillars lean to catch her whispers,
and all the temple’s dust becomes a prism
refracting one word carved in light: Remember.
But wisdom, once attained, permits no peace—
it gnaws the marrow from the bone of hope,
it drinks the nectar meant for lesser hearts,
it builds its throne upon the ruins of trust.
So she remains, both seer and sacrifice,
a testament to courage clothed in woe,
her every breath a condemnation sweet
of all the lies that let the blind sleep sound.
The temple keeps her like a precious wound,
and night by night, her silent scream resounds.
