FEELING THE HEAT

I wrote this poem back in the days when unfettered travel was still possible and revised it  during our recent lockdown when even a trip to the nearest supermarket was fraught with difficulties. How things change!

ITALIAN CHURCH

Here it is cool, outside the sun

drives cats indoors and blisters paint.

In this dark church, I mop my brow

and search for prayers but there are none

that I remember: no lost, quaint,

supportive words come to me now.

From worship I am long estranged,

I try to feel yet feel unchanged.

Once churches were a place to pray,

now noisy tourists wander through

with baseball-hats and mobile phones

to photograph then turn away:

they have their own gods, even so,

that speak to them in sharp ring tones

but maybe their gods, shrill and small,

are better than no god at all?

A plaster-cast Madonna glares

from a deep alcove on my right

while, to the left, slim candles burn

and Saints regard me from their lairs

with plastic eyes, ferocious, bright,

and features, pale, devout and stern.

Old nonnas pray, mumble and groan 

in varnished pews, their hands like stone,

and though the temperature outside

is forty-two degrees at least,

I rise and quickly slip away,

spooked by those statues, angry-eyed.

I pass a geriatric priest

and drop a euro in his tray.

The thanks he mutters, low and terse, 

could just as well have been a curse.