We are modern penitents,
opening our backpacks
in awkward reverence,
doing a weird shuffling dance
around some Spanish kids
in regulation red jeans.
We watch the cardigans and
kagoules assume the pose
for walking solemn rooms;
hands clasped to the back,
pacing slow, stroking throats.
There are those who tap and jot
and know what rood screens are,
an old academic, sent scuttling
by the muffs and shit adorning
an Offili and those, who stare mute
at their coffee wondering how it
could possibly cost that much.
And kids wriggling at the legs
of knackered parents rehearsing
the argument which will rise
in the gift shop and abate
suddenly in front of
the monumental breasts
of a Rubens,
or something filthy
by Fuseli.
And though these measureless caverns
draw their pilgrims to shitholes
like Bilbao, with relics of modern saints,
a jewel encrusted skull by Hirst,
or the empty Creed of post-modernism;
a light switch ticking on and off
now you give a fuck now you don’t,
they also draw from not too deep inside
all too often neglected desires
for love transcending time,
a God shaped hole waiting to be filled
perhaps by Blake,
who’s worlds whirled crazy
in a grain of sand, and who’s feet
in not so ancient times,
walked the softly creaking
boards of The Academy.
In this blent air, all our pasts collide
and we are free to communicate with
the chaos of human will, our pride,
our wars, our nation building urge,
giving way to post imperial decline,
and modern guilt reflected in
a tank of oil, where you also still
can glimpse, our greatness.
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