Dancing Dust
	Poems by Mollie Caird (1922-2000)
	Romanesque
Home Alphabetic index of poems Thematic index of poems Biography Gallery Contact and links	The pilgrims are shuffling the chevet, All suddenly solemn In spite of the crowd, the corralling lay brothers, The route’s camaraderie And the blind man’s dog, irreverently lifting a leg Against a column. Some have friends who dress stone, but that cannot explain The miraculous spires, And their heads know that monks in shadowed side chapels Sing gradual and antiphon, But they feel the frisson of unearthly sound, and hearts know They are angels’ choirs. Darkness of blind arcades, roof lost in shadows, And scarcely glimmering Pinpricks of brightness from clerestory windows And small struggling candles, Then, under the lantern explosion of light And the saint’s casket shimmering, Silver and gold and champlevé depicting The holy man’s history, The glittering reliquary its own major miracles: Small wonder the bones Encased in such splendour can marvellously work Magic and mystery. I conjure the church as it was, brilliant with paint, Gaudy with gildings, But fail, as my eyes grasp only the stones and the structure Of pier, arch and groyne, So I write of these things in a metre of Thomas Hardy, Who understood buildings. Undated