Author's Reading (requires RealPlayer)

1

A lens preserves the ceiling's fall;
below, on hallowed floor,
two monks and two technicians died.
In that corner of the world
now tents are raised through valleys,
Umbrian autumn nights turn cold;
a strained man cools his forehead
with the bared brick of a wall,
its plaster crazed; seismographs read
like heart attacks of blood-splashed stone
'...and we need homes,' as someone said,
'a basilica, we don't need.'

2

Stone on stone, unyielding words
and powdery sunlight fill its nave;
but the part about Francis preaching to birds,
is it intact? did it even survive?

3

What devotion from the volunteers --
to see them not long afterwards
sifting through masonry dust
for bits of surface, down on their knees,
aftershocks coming as strong as the quake,
for tempera fresco in pink, cream or blue
by Giotto and Cimabue --
what patience to restore lost years,
to give us the colouring of the past!

4

'Travelling,' he wrote, 'in the wake of a war
is not the best way of seeing a country...'
Yet the monastery like a citadel
commanded the whole left side of its hill
that autumn, 1944,
when dad in his battledress khaki kit
craned back an itchy neck to catch it --
come in one piece through the war.

5

In plain brown habit, his tonsure bare,
gold halo embossed onto sketchy distance,
arms outstretched, it seems he says,
'No creature lives on bread alone' --
and under the faded leaves they come.
Behind, a fellow monk looks askance
at Francis encouraging birds to praise
the Lord God who made them.

6

I was crossing cut lawn between labs
towards a small alcove of trees,
some trunks sawn flat to form benches,
when the prudent birds took flight
and perched on out-of-reach branches.

St Francis, there was nothing to tell
the sparrows on that autumn day,
nothing of creatures granted souls at last
or many-fold dangers manifested by me;
they knew, and just as well.