Cathedral Kitsch
Does God love gold? Does He shine back
At Himself from walls Like these, leafed
In the earth’s softest wealth?
Women light candles,
Pray into their fistful of beads.
Cameras spit human light
Into the vast holy dark,
And what glistens back
Is high up and cold. I feel
Man here. The same wish
That named the planets.
Man with his shoes and tools,
His insistence to prove we exist
Just like God, in the large
And the small, the great
And the frayed. In the chords
That rise from the tall brass pipes,
And the chorus of crushed cans
Someone drags over cobbles
In the secular street.