The Cathedral’s Veil of Unforgotten Hours
A woman treads with footsteps drowned in echoes of decay.
Her mantle, black as ravens’ throats, consumes the ashen light,
While specters of her yesterdays unspool into the night.
The nave extends its gauntlet cold, a spine of marble chill,
Each pillar crowned with carven saints whose eyes no tears can spill.
She halts where stained glass martyrs bleed in hues of tarnished gold,
Their fractured limbs cast down to trace the story never told.
A locket burns against her breast—a heart turned to a tomb—
Its hinge, a rusted memory; its portrait, winter’s bloom.
She parts the chain with trembling hands (the past’s unyielding noose)
And gazes on the face now lost to time’s relentless truce.
“Once more,” she breathes to vacant air, “once more I’ll tread that hour
When laughter fell like petals through our sunlit ivory tower.”
But silence answers, thick and old as dust on ledgers sealed—
The cathedral drinks her whispered hope, gives nothing but revealed.
A draft ascends from crypts below, a sigh through rotted wood,
Extinguishing her single taper’s frail and grieving hood.
Darkness pools around her skirts, climbs slow as rising tide,
Yet in that black, a glimmer stirs—a door cracks open wide.
Not stone nor oak but something thin as veil between two breaths,
Through which she spies a ghostly park where life defies all deaths.
There, beneath the elm’s broad arm (now ash in present’s flame),
A child chases dandelion seeds none else dare claim.
Her throat constricts around a name the years have stripped to bone,
As phantom winds lift golden hair she’d mourned as hers alone.
“Come back,” she pleads, but iron gates materialize between,
Their bars the chains of consequence, their lock what might have been.
The vision bleeds like watercolors ravaged by the rain,
Yet still she lunges through the gloom, a moth to memory’s flame.
Her fingers graze the shifting mist—oh, cruel mirage of touch!—
And suddenly the floor gives way to sands she clutches much.
Not sand, but shards of shattered glass from windows time has slain,
Each fragment sharp with echoes of a joy now turned to bane.
They cut her palms to ribbons raw, this Eucharist of pain,
As choir loft unleashes whispers none can quite restrain:
“Seek you the child who slipped between the seconds’ slender cracks?
The one you turned from for a breath to study commerce’s tracks?
The carriage wheel that stole her song cares not for mothers’ cries—
The past is but a fossil; touch it, and it dies.”
She crawls toward the altar high, her trail a crimson scroll,
Inscribing pleas in languages long rotted from the soul.
“Take flesh instead,” she rasps to shapes that writhe in candle smoke,
“Take voice, take breath, take heartbeat—leave but that single spoke—”
A clangor shakes the rafters then, the bell-tower’s lament,
Twelve iron throats proclaiming night’s unalterable bent.
The final stroke resounds as chains dragged through eternity,
And where the ghost-child stood now grows a dark and thorned tree.
Its branches twist like broken vows, its roots tear up the tiles,
While from its boughs hang silver fruits—a hundred mirrored smiles.
She staggers up to grasp one sphere with hands both raw and dire,
Only to watch her reflection warp in Time’s cold fire.
The young face there, now lined with grief; the bright eyes, haunted pools;
A mouth once shaped for ballads reshaped for mourning’s tools.
She shatters glass against the stones, each piece a splintered year,
As shadows coalesce to form a presence drawing near.
No corpse, no angel, but a thing of smoke and stolen breath,
Its voice the creak of coffin lids, its scent the air before death:
“You kneel where countless others knelt to bargain with the moon,
But dawn still comes, inexorable, to burn away your rune.”
“I’ll burn with it,” she challenges, “if ash might sow new birth.
Undo the clock’s cruel verdict—give me back her worth!”
The specter laughs, a sound like books slammed shut in distant rooms,
“Your grief’s a pretty sculpture ’mid this garden of tombs.”
It gestures to the walls where shapes in frescoes half-erased
Hold out their arms in frozen bids for mercies long disgraced.
A queen whose babe was swapped for stones, a knight whose oath turned air,
Their pigments flaking slowly to the void beneath despair.
“Join them,” it hisses, “in their frame of never-dying want,
Or take my hand and walk into the present’s meager haunt.”
She stares into the locket’s face, now smeared with blood and grime,
Then sets it gently on the stones, a grave without a rhyme.
The dawn’s first blade slices through glass depicting mercy’s face,
Illuminating golden dust in unforgiving grace.
Where once a woman knelt in tears, now rests an empty shroud,
The locket open, vacant, save for shadows made from cloud.
And high above, the carven saints still stare with vacant eyes,
While through the rose window’s wounds, a mocking lark replies.
The bells resume their counting of hours yet to be breached,
As stone by stone, the cathedral seals the mystery it has leeched.
