Ten Thousand Mouths

The desert bore no name upon its breath,
No sigil scrawled in sun or dune or bone;
Yet there it crouched – where thirst makes pact with death –
A temple hewn from aeons not our own.
Its pillars wept with mouths of dust and flint,
And every silence sang some whispered hint.

No mortal chisel wrought those gaping walls,
No priest designed that hymn-devouring nave –
Each spire, a scream that time no longer stalls,
Each stone, a tongue that licked a godless grave.
Through sun-bleached halls where none but wind has trod,
The ruin moaned the unsayable of God.

It spoke – not once, but always, evermore –
A choir of mouths in sandstone aperture,
Their chants like prayers drowned in metaphor,
Too vast, too full of teeth to still endure.
The voice was hunger. Meaning? Never known.
It praised a name too large to stand alone.

O thou, whose face no worshipper hath seen,
Whose breath is space, whose thought devours the stars –
Thy house remains, where all that might have been
Now curls in hymns through shadow-whetted scars.
The mouths speak not for thee – they are thy mind,
A latticework of hunger unconfined.

Once, pilgrims came, with candles, chants, and bones,
To beg for dreams or rend their guilt in flame –
But none returned with skin or sacred tones,
Just sand-swept robes and mouths that knew thy name.
Now only jackals pass, and they too leer –
For jackals know when old gods linger near.

I came alone, in dusk’s unfaithful light,
And heard the walls begin their ashen moan.
Each wordless verse reared up in soundless fright –
The hymn was sung, but not for me alone.
Something within me opened – cracked – became
Another mouth through which it spoke its name.

The wind still whines through throatless, howling stone,
A song of praise no ear was shaped to bear.
The temple lives, though flesh and time are gone –
It speaks, and all the desert bends to hear.
O traveler – kneel. The wind will teach you much.
It feeds on prayers. It waits for you to touch.