by William John Watkins
   
  

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Cathedrals





     

Those walls of stone the ages built
as lasting monuments to God
seem to us magnificent, if somewhat odd
admixtures of both love and guilt,

as if two warring tendencies
combined to make up every wall,
— the certainty that all things fall,
the hope of our Ascendancy .

They built those sheets of stony lace
too thin, too high, they knew, to stand;
the buttresses themselves were planned
with two parts science, one part Grace,

held up as much by faith and love
as by the split of downward force
out along the buttress course,
with metaphors for help, Above.
  

Able Muse