Listening for the Drum Between Raindrops
The sandstone gleams with dew, each droplet resting briefly before slipping into a vine-carved groove. The sound—softer than a moth’s wing—is lost to the jungle, but the stone remembers.
The apsara stands in a quiet rhythm. Not posed, but listening. Her fingers offer a gesture that does not close. A pause that does not end. I lean into the hush, aligning lens and breath. The tripod settles like a spine into earth.
I press the release and wait. Not to take, but to receive.
In the stillness, the world becomes tonal: light in gradients, sound in vapour. Her anklets do not chime, yet I hear them—the memory of motion in a body now held by time. The exposure completes, and the air returns like an aftertaste.
Later, in the darkroom, the chiaroscuro flows from silver grain, not as invention, but as retrieval. The stone becomes skin. The silence, voice.
The print arrives not as a product, but as an echo—the one I first heard beneath cloud and rain.
Her silence turns
wild rain into measured pulse;
roots listen, undisturbed.Light rests on a braided crown—
echo of a thunder that never breaks.She offers two fingers,
opens a gate inside the chest
where stone may learn to sing.
Also in Library
What the World Remembers
July moved through walls, bodies, songs, scars, cups, pages and stones—ordinary and mythic things that remember what human beings forget. Across Angkor, the Odyssey, Tolkien, Vedic creation, Greek war and quiet domestic rooms, the Library returned to one governing question: when memory fails, what in the world continues to know us?
The Story on the Wall
At Angkor Wat, more than fifty metres of carved sandstone hold the Battle of Lanka. Rama is present, but he must be found. This Prologue to The Story That Became Cambodia begins with the monumental certainty of the wall—and asks what the finished image cannot reveal about the Ramayana’s earlier journey into Khmer history.
The Mouth You Gave Me
A spare lyric poem from The Vow on breath, speech, gratitude, and the received body through which every answer must be formed and released.
Continue Reading
If this piece found something in you, you may wish to continue the journey elsewhere.
On The Lantern Chronicles, I gather writings from Angkor, myth and legend, contemplative essays, and poetry — works shaped by silence, beauty, wonder, memory, and the deeper questions that follow us through the world.
It is a place for stone and story, reflection and vow, shadow and revelation.
You would be most welcome there.