The Temple of Unspoken Echoes
A figure lingers, bent by time’s unyielding throes,
His shadow stretched like whispers o’er the temple’s bones,
Where marble gods, once worshipped, wear the lichen’s clothes.
The air, a parchment scrawled with scent of rain and moss,
Bears memories of chants that through these arches rang,
Now stilled as petals pressed where love embalms its loss—
A sanctuary where his heart’s mute sorrows hang.
Here, decades past, when youth’s bold fire lit his gaze,
He trod these halls, a scholar thirsting for the arcane,
Deciphering the scripts that Time herself obeys,
Yet blind to scripts of flesh, the pulse beneath his vein.
Till one dim eve, as twilight bled through fractured domes,
He glimpsed her—Elenor—whose hands, like autumn’s breath,
Caressed the fading frescoes, healing ancient roams
Of pigments cracked by years, by silence, and by death.
No word was sown between them, yet the air grew dense
With all the unsung ballads hearts hoard in their keep,
Her laughter, silver-slight, a lute’s faint recompense,
Awoke the crypts where his sequestered passions sleep.
She moved as moonbeams dance on midnight’s ebon stream,
Her eyes, twin embers veiled by dusk’s repentant hue,
And in their shared silence burgeoned forth a dream
That roots in stone, yet dares to taste the boundless blue.
Through weeks they met as shadows in this vaulted sphere,
She mending art, he tracing tongues of fallen kings,
While stolen glances wove a tapestry austere—
A lexicon of pauses, voiceless whisperings.
Her fingers, brushed with ochre, azure, gold’s regret,
Would tremble as his sleeve grazed hers in passing by,
And once, a moth, dust-winged, alit on her coquette,
As if to mask the flush that stormed her cheek’s shy sky.
But lo! The fates, who spin their threads with jesting hands,
Had hung a sword unseen above their frail delight:
For she was pledged ere spring to wed in distant lands,
A lord of barren acres, groomed for duty’s rite.
This truth, a serpent coiled beneath their temple’s bloom,
She hid, as one might veil a scar too raw to name,
And he, though versed in scripts that foretell empires’ doom,
Read not the dirge inscribed in every glance’s flame.
Till came the day her brush traced Isis’ weathered face,
And he, translating hymns to long-forgotten skies,
Found courage in the god’s stone gaze to interlace
His soul’s mute cry with words that mortals deem wise:
“What wisdom lies in tongues that crumble to the dust,
If hearts, like scrolls sealed fast, ne’er risk their fragile creed?
The ancients carved their truths in rock, yet still we trust
To voiceless sighs the seeds our trembling lips dare need.”
Her brush froze midair—a sparrow pinned by frost—
The temple’s breath held still, the world reduced to naught
But pulsing veins, the drip of wax from candles crossed,
And centuries of dust that bore what they had wrought.
Then soft, as petals fall where no wind dares to stir,
She spoke: “To mend is all I’ve known. These fractured hues
Are loves that outlast flesh, though none remain to err
Their beauty. What’s restored, Time’s tooth may not refuse.”
He grasped her wrist—so slight, a bird’s bone wrapped in dusk—
“But we are Time’s own fools, who let her theft prevail!
These stones were kissed by lips now ash; their godly musk
Outlives the hands that lit the incense. Must we fail
To claim one fragile hour, though ruin dog its heel?”
Her tears, first jewels of anguish, broke the spell between,
As storm clouds crack to loose what skies could not conceal:
“Tomorrow’s dawn shall find me bound where vows convene.”
What nights he paced those cloisters, gnawed by ifs and whens,
While carven deities mocked with stony stare!
The moon waxed full, then waned—a mirror to the lens
Through which his soul’s bright flame dimmed to a ghostly glare.
No more her laughter graced the echoes’ hollow choir,
No more her touch’s shadow warmed the sunless air,
Till grief, that alchemist, transmuted love to pyre,
And he became the shrine to ruins of despair.
Now, fifty winters gone, he haunts their temple’s corpse,
A living ghost among the dead gods’ disarray,
Each fissured frieze a chapter in their brief discourse,
Each crumbling saint a sentinel of might-have-been.
Tonight, as owls hymn the expiry of day,
He kneels where once her pigments danced like captive light,
And presses to his breast a scroll, long hid away—
Her name in sapphire ink, encoffined from his sight.
The parchment falls, uncurling secrets to the floor,
Revealing not the verse he’d penned in youth’s rash fire,
But strokes of azure, umber—portraits by the score—
His face, in every angle, drawn with fierce desire.
Here, profile limned in strokes that yearned to bridge the void,
There, brow caressed by brushwork’s most devout pretense,
A hundred renditions, patiently employed,
Each line a silent plea, each hue a mute defense.
The truth, like ivy, chokes what breath remains within—
She’d loved him, loved him as the sea adores the shore,
In endless, fruitless surges, bound to lose and win,
Yet poured her soul into these shades forevermore.
He clutches to his heart this gallery of pain,
While through the shattered vaults, a spectral breeze takes flight,
Carving her name in dust he’ll never cleanse again,
As moonlight etches two shadows where there kneels but one tonight.
The frost, indifferent scribe, inscribes his final hour,
His breath a fading mist on portraits’ blameless gaze,
While past and present merge like snowflakes in a shower—
Her hands, now dust, reach through the veil of temporal haze.
The scrolls, their faces blurred by tears no eye perceives,
Crumple to ash, as if the gods at last relent,
And in the temple’s throat, the wind of midnight grieves
A song of might-have-beens no epitaph can vent.
Thus ends the tale where Love, that most relentless scribe,
Inscribes hearts with tales too fierce for tongues to shape,
Where what was never voiced becomes the fatal bribe
To pay the ferryman who seals the spirit’s tape.
Let pilgrims tread these stones and hear, in every breeze,
Two ghosts of choice unmade—the ache of paths untrod—
For in this temple’s heart, beneath the carven trees,
Eternity holds hands with all we leave unsaid.
