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
Where a Name Could Not Follow
A boy in the sandstone quarries beneath Phnom Kulen learns the first law of sacred building: not strength, not speed, but attention. Where a Name Could Not Follow imagines the life of an unnamed Angkorean stone-master whose hands helped move mountain into temple — and whose name vanished where the stone endured.
The Apsara Against the Assembly Line
In the darkroom, the print rises slowly from the tray: silver darkening into shadow, stone gathering itself from blankness. At Angkor, the apsaras offer the same lesson. Though repeated in their thousands, each waits to be seen. Against the assembly line of speed and sameness, slowness restores the soul’s signature.
The Wall That Still Holds Them
Two presences endure within a wall that no longer closes seamlessly around them. One withdraws into shadow; the other comes further into the light of legibility. Around them, fracture, erosion, and carved stone become a single field of custody, where grace survives within damage, not beyond it.
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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.