#288: February 5, 2007

You'll find Golgotha Church up on that hill,
whose carpenters and masons worked in bones;
with monks' skulls laid in her foundation stones,
She's stood six centuries, and stands there still.

The ribs of holy men her chandeliers,
and torches made of thigh-bones fire those halls.
They say at night the silver moonlight falls
like water through her silent, charnel tiers.

And so, with God's machinery laid bare,
with bodies stripped of flesh and purged of lust,
perhaps these penitents have made their peace.
But when the wind blows through her, and the air
goes gritty with a thousand friars' dust,
she moans, and it sounds nothing like release.