The Temple’s Whisper
A silhouette of shadows, bent and thinned,
To tread the path where once the sacred drums
Throbbed through these stones, now mute as ash, chagrined.
The temple stands—a carcass of old pride—
Its columns claw the sky like ribs unburied,
While ivy-strangled arches moan and sigh,
Their hymns devoured by the wind’s cold ferry.
Here, memory clings like lichen to the walls,
And every crack exhales a breath of years.
The old man’s hands, parchment-thin, recall
The weight of incense, echoes of lost prayers.
He kneels where altars gleamed with stolen gold,
Now cradling dust, a hollowed, nameless shrine,
And whispers to the dusk a tale untold—
A exile’s psalm, a lifetime’s fractured line.
Beneath a slab where serpents coil in sleep,
A corner weeps with mildew’s silver bloom.
There, pressed between the stones, a secret keeps
Its vigil—folded sorrow in the gloom.
A letter, frail as wings of moth, he finds,
Its seal still clenched like some small, stubborn grief.
The wax bears crests of kingdoms left behind,
A dragon’s tongue, a laurel, last relief.
His breath unknots the years; the page unfolds
To spill a girl’s voice from its brittle cage.
“Father,” it starts—and all the temple holds
Its breath. The stars pause in their pilgrimage.
“The peaches blush above our courtyard wall,
Just as they did when last you kissed my brow.
I write this where the lotus used to sprawl
Across the pond you dug. It’s dried up now.”
The ink, once black as ravens in mid-flight,
Has faded to the hue of storm-drenched sparrows.
Each character, a wound he dare not write,
Now bleeds through time to pierce his marrow.
“They say you dwell among the western sands,
Where jade gives way to dunes’ unending sigh.
I left this where you’d read it—where your hands
Might touch the stone that heard our last goodbye.”
He sees her—ten years old, with ink-stained palms—
Practicing brushstrokes by the persimmon tree.
The lanterns’ dance, the summer night’s soft psalms,
Now ash. Now ghosts. Now only this debris.
The moon, that ancient, pitiless scribe, etches
His shadow long across the broken floor.
Somewhere, a nightjar’s cry punctuates niches
Where gods once laughed. They laugh here no more.
“Each autumn, I return to sweep the leaves
From empty rooms that hoard your vanished voice.
The magistrate’s new edict still bereaves—
They’ve barred your name, but not my heart’s choice.
I wed, as you advised, the cobbler’s son.
He mends the world’s soles; I mend his shirts.
Our child—your grandson—learns to hold a brush,
And paints the peach trees where your memory flirts.”
The old man’s tears, slow as temple drips,
Erode the dust on cheeks long parched of hope.
Decades ago, the law’s steel-tipped whips
Had scourged him hence for some forgotten trope—
A poem’s line? A bureaucrat’s slighted pride?
The reason rots with archives turned to mould.
Exile needs no cause save power’s tide
That sweeps the weak where history stays untold.
“Last spring, the doctors shook their hoary heads—
A growth, they said, like bamboo through my lung.
I’ve left this where the temple’s shadow spreads
At moonrise, where we last clung.
Don’t mourn me where my bones can’t hear your cries.
But if, by chance, you stand where pillars groan,
Know I forgave the earth, the sea, the skies
The day they carved my flesh from your hearthstone.”
The date—sweet venom—carries winter’s sting:
Fifteen full years have gnawed since her last breath.
He tears his tunic where the heart might wring
Itself to rags, to naught, to second death.
All night he rocks, the letter pressed to lips
That taste her childhood in the mulberry ink.
Dawn finds him marble-cold, with eclipse
Eternal sealing eyes that dared to blink.
They’ll find him thus, when vine and rot concede
To some fool’s curiosity or theft—
A skeleton embracing brittle reed,
A skull’s grin facing where her words were left.
The temple keeps its pact of silence still.
The moon still cuts. The stars still chart their turns.
Somewhere, a grandson plucks a poet’s quill
And writes of peach trees where no shadow yearns.
