I was a cathedral made of slate,

built in a century of rain.

Each stone a shadow, carved and set,

to hold a vault of quiet pain.

The windows, stained with ache and night,

filtered the sun in shards of gray,

till all the hallways, dim and deep,

forgot the blueprint of the day.

Then came the trembling in the ground—

not wrath, but some deep, tender sigh.

The old walls groaned a dusty sound

and let the wounded daylight in.

I watched the careful architecture fall:

the altar of a lost lament,

the buttress of a futile wall,

the roof that grief had long since bent.

Now in the rubble, on my knees,

I sort the fragments, sharp and strange.

This piece—a memory that aches,

I fit it to a newer shape.

I trade old mortar, thick with fear,

for mortar made of morning breath.

Each chosen splinter, set with care,

defies the former architect.

I leave a space where slate had been,

an open frame against the sky,

to house the visits of the wind

and let the migrating birds fly through.

I place a stone worn smooth by tears,

not as a cornerstone, but art,

a testament to all the years,

yet not the center, just a part.

The mosaic forms with patient hands,

a brighter, more imperfect scheme.

It cannot, will not, ever be

the unmarred structure of a dream.

But in this slow and deliberate art,

a different kind of strength is grown:

a shelter with a living heart,

where light is stitched into the bone.

And when the evening paints its chill,

and ghosts of old foundations moan,

I trace the lines of my own will,

this broken, beautiful, rebuilt home.

For in the choice of every piece,

in fractures where the dawn gets through,

I find, not that the hurting ceases,

but that a broken thing can bloom anew.