Stone That Remembers the Sky

When kingdoms loosen their grip on time
and crowns fall quiet into names,
stone learns another grammar.

Here, towers lift the memory of mountains
back into the air.
Here, corridors rehearse the walk of gods
until the feet of farmers, monks, and rain
inherit the rhythm.

Angkor—
not a ruin,
but a sentence still being spoken.

The centuries did not end you.
They only changed the mouth.

Moss learned the syllables of sandstone.
Roots signed their names slowly.
Light returned each dawn
to read what had not been erased.

Empires fell elsewhere—
with fire, with forgetting.
But here, devotion stayed behind,
quiet as a held breath,
waiting for the world to remember
how to kneel.

Bas-reliefs keep the long memory:
armies becoming waves,
waves becoming prayer.

The apsaras do not look at us.
But the space around them tightens,
as if movement has just passed through.
I stepped back
without deciding to.

Listen:
the galleries are full of listening.

The poem was never only on palm leaf.
It was always written in proportion,
in the distance between tower and tower,
in the way shadow bows
before light enters the sanctuary.

What was lost was never gone.
What endured was never loud.

Glory did not die here—
it learned to stand
without witnesses.