She wore the hour like threadbare linen spun,
Its buttons fastened tight against her bones.
The bell pealed once beneath a speechless sun,
Then silence settled deep in chapel stones.

Her sisters watched as time began to fray,
The air unseamed by winds that bore no name.
The suit she wore had wept its threads away,
Yet stitched her gently into grief and flame.

It wasn’t hers - not truly, not by right.
Its sleeves were sewn from breath and dust and dream.
Its lining whispered secrets lost to night,
And mother’s voice ran dark beneath the seam.

A rooster called atop the chapel’s brow,
Though dusk and dawn were neither near nor true.
Inside her pocket ticked a folded vow,
Its ink gone pale, its purpose bleeding through.

She reached toward water with a trembling hand,
And wrung the sorrow from the sky’s torn cloth.
The note dissolved like foam upon the sand--
She wore the name, unclaimed, that marked her troth.

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