Our Collapsed Cathedral

They said we built a sanctuary
With whispers on the floor
A kind of quiet gravity
I'd never known before
You were the hymn my heart would hum
When daylight disappeared
But now the stained glass cold and dumb
Holds every silent tear

And I still sweep the broken aisles
Where echoes hold your name
Our chapel, now in ruined styles
Just columns left of flame

What we consecrated, now decays
A fallen spire in a rusted sky
This devotion turned to disarray
An altar where the candles die
I light a match to see the walls
But shadows are the only things that rise
Our collapsed cathedral quietly falls
Behind my tired eyes
Behind my tired eyes

I trace the frescoes, cracked and old
Our vows in faded paint
The marble once was warm to hold
Now chilled with what it ain't
We wrote our psalms in hopeful hands
On parchment now grown thin
A theology of shifting sands
Let the slow collapse begin

And I still kneel on splintered wood
Where communion used to breathe
But the sacrament's not understood
By ghosts the walls bequeath

What we consecrated, now decays
A fallen spire in a rusted sky
This devotion turned to disarray
An altar where the candles die
I light a match to see the walls
But shadows are the only things that rise
Our collapsed cathedral quietly falls
Behind my tired eyes

Ours was not a spark that fled
It was a whole cosmology, undone
A universe inside a bed
Now cold beneath a sunless Sun
I wander through the nave of us
A pilgrim without prayer
Collecting sanctified dust
In this unholiest of air

And maybe ruin is a kind of grace
A slow unveiling of the bone
This hollowed, hallowed, empty space
Is where I go to be alone?
Our cathedral's just an outline now
A blueprint drawn in ash and rain
But even in its empty brow
I whisper your name
I whisper your name