Salt Cathedral

Beneath the hill the river has been working its slow argument for centuries, dissolving limestone into chambers no one mapped, no one named, where the dark keeps its own counsel.

Water remembers every surface it has touched. It carries the mountain downward grain by grain, deposits it in deltas, in the lacework of stalactites that hang like frozen speech— each drop a syllable the earth was saving.

I have stood in caverns where the ceiling glittered with a thousand years of patience, where silence had a texture you could almost hold, and understood that tenderness is just erosion with a longer name.

The river does not grieve the stone it takes. The stone does not refuse the river's tongue. They make between them something neither could have made alone— this cathedral, this hollow singing bone.