Poem of the Week

(St Andrews Cathedral)

These stones speak a level language

murmured word by word

a speech pocked and porous with loss

and the slow hungers of weathering.

And there, in the broken choir, children

are all raised voice, loving the play of outline

and absence where the dissembled god

has shared his shape and homed us.

At the end of the nave, the east front stands

both altered and unchanged,

its arch like a glottal stop.

And what comes across, half-said

into all that space, is that it's enough

to love the air we move through.