Ash of my Psalm

The rafters have sagged to a prayerless lean,

and the bell sleeps with its mouth to the floor.

No hand has struck it since the locust year,

when the pews filled with dust

and the river took the bridge away.

Once, I came here on Sundays,

when the air smelled of cedar hymnals

and candle soot clung to the ribs of the room.

Now, the light drips through the roof

in slow, thin threads,

and the wasps keep their own liturgy.

I sit where the pulpit splintered,

the boards splaying like unbuttoned ribs,

and I watch the ivy lean in through the windows,

patient as a widow in black crepe.

It hums against the glass,

as if telling me the way back to the soil.

Outside, the graveyard is thick with sumac,

stones tilted toward the earth like tired saints.

Names bleed away in the rain,

and the lambs carved on marble have lost their faces.

The air is saltless—

it tastes of moth wings and candle wicks gone cold.

Somewhere behind the pines,

the river folds into itself,

a silver ribbon knotted in the dark.

I can hear it call,

low as the breath a body gives

just before the chest goes still.

The chapel smells of old rain caught in wood,

the kind that never dries,

only deepens.

I reckon a man could lie down here,

in the shadow of hymnals

and the long silence after “Amen,”

and be covered by nothing

but the patience of dust.

And now—

I see the beans spilled in the dark corners,

pale and dry as the bones once housed here.

The ash in the cracks is thick as dried blood,

its rust spread by the shuffle of wind—

that wind, which once kept time in my wrist,

now turning the air slow as a mourner’s hand.

The dust stirs,

and I feel the soul it carries,

light as chaff,

drifting out the open door.

It does not look back.