Poetry: Vatican City

The recent announcement of the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI prompted me to find this piece, which I wrote during a college trip to Rome in January 2010.

Behold, behold, archaic sites;

Eternal sweeping columns and

Adjacent arches far and wide.

These floorboards for the heavens

Jut artistically erect aside

A marble statue; and another; and another.

 

Crafted from the hands of men

Whose presence still remains

Within these Roman confines,

These superficial walls.

 

The guards, the ones who stand for order,

Receiving admiration proud;

Their blue and yellow livery

Drenched by the January sunshine.

 

Then come the governors,

The priests with their intricate capes,

Majestic swaggers, all

Ennobled with embroidered gold.

 

Figures of a higher place;

These robed men who speak the word of God

And, masked, with upheld heads and stiffened postures,

Declare themselves Divine.

 

Amongst the crowd of pourers,

Dazzled by such grandeur,

There comes a calling, a message perhaps;

Which ignorance forbids the notice of my peers.

 

A sight so stark and clear to me

That, by the push of instinct,

A deeper field of thought appears

Without consult to reason.

 

 For, in view of my still gaze I see

A pitiful beggar crouched upon the ground;

Invisible

From a world passing so swiftly through him.

 

Withered and detached, emitting

No expression, there or here

In this void of elaborate whiteness which

Would rather see him disappear.

 

Not one hand I see extended

To this homeless creature on display;

To see desperation mended,

To bring halt to this decay.

 

The governors hover vast and loud

Performances delivered timed.

Immortalised routine address;

Immortal as compassion mimed.

 

Behold, behold, archaic sites;

Casting shadows in the Winter sun.

I ask myself,

In this holiest of cities,

‘Where is God?’

For I see and I feel none.

 

 

 

(C) Liam Elvish

2010