As if time’s relentless plod of years
were not enough,
or the feet of countless mourners,
who’d trod with tears these airy halls of death,
whose bone-finger arches cloistered
their floored vaults smoothed
to a polished album of the dead—
then in war’s last year lay bare to bombs
of liberating devastation, until timbers and tombs
lay in a heap. The grand stories of faith and myth,
their frescoed glory already fading fell amidst tears
of marble and lead. A scene of glorious judgment
and condemnation was itself condemned to fire.

But there were other warriors then, who fought with
camera and pen and grit behind retreating lines.
Their boot camps were museums. These men
made monuments their battleground
and red-tape tangles their barbed barricades
to conquer.           
                     So today I walk in wonder where
Gozzoli showed his view of human folly
faded now but given voice by human dedication,
a triumph of life here in this holy field.