Poetry

Pantheon

Lost in a maze of sunless alleys

you come across it suddenly from a side street,

concrete, granite, ash dark in spring light.

Two thousand years and set to stay.

Easy to imagine all the gods still here

locked in stone, brooding.

At the apex an oculus admits the sun.

Apollo's ghost traverses the interior

marking time.

Stripped of bronze by popes,

feared full of demons; for now, a holy place.

Look at it squatting in the square,

an eclipse, a black hole.

And you a speck, transient as a sparrow,

dragged towards it.

Jenny Donnison

© 2014