From blue and white whose
form is sunlight, where the
heat beats down upon my head
and back, and folds me in a
world that smiles and
sits and sips and rattles
strings of brightly-coloured beads -
into a bowl of shade.
Here the years are trapped,
made cloying, dark, and silent.
The battered frescoes stare from
centuries through air that holds
itself apart, that never strays
into the streets outside.
This cool that shadows gold
and polished wood, that lies upon
the pebbles of the patterned
floor in black and white,
detains me here, and hints at
what I used to feel
when I believed in what
the builders of this church believed.