Weather

The chapels are open to weather now.

Stone remembering nothing.
Arches split where ivy enters
with patient hands.

Once there were voices here.
Measured voices.
Men who spoke of eternity
as if it were an address
one might write on an envelope.

Their words have thinned.

Only fragments remain—
a psalm caught in the rafters,
a syllable moving through dust.

The shepherd’s staff lies rusting
where the hill folds into itself.
No one has come to claim it.

Even the sky seems uncertain
what sign it once carried.

Night passes without announcement.

We were told the law descended
like breath upon a mountain.
But mountains shift.
And breath
is only air returning to air.

So the people walk outward.

Across fields
that remember nothing of covenants.

Their voices circle back to them
as though the earth
were a hollow instrument.

No answer.

The rivers move in a language
that does not translate.

The compass trembles.
North has loosened its claim.

It is possible
the whole design was temporary.

A scaffolding.

Something meant
to hold the shape of longing
until it could stand alone.

And yet—

in the rubble behind the chapel wall
something small insists.

A green shoot
through stone.

Acacia perhaps.

No blessing spoken over it.
No altar nearby.

Still it lifts itself
toward whatever light remains.

One could mistake it
for persistence.

Or accident.

Or the beginning
of another story

not yet written
in the language of belief.