Declines and Declining
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
The wood that makes the icons’ boxes lacks
The holiness that throbs, still, through these saints
And sacred ones. Despite the inner cracks
(Inside the images and down their paints
Of passioned blue, and righteous red, and gold
Of fissured martyrs’ crowns) the frontal glass
Is like devotion doing work to hold
The priestliness despite each small crevasse.
The larger ones have torn these hillsides like
A prophet rending garments, as the robe
Of Greece’s landscape. Quakes have been a pike
Deployed inside a mountain, each harsh probe
To test the people and their bishops, faith,
And houses. Greece declines to be a wraith.