Save the Cathedral! (1)

The Cathedral

 

What counts as old?  Columbus paddling ashore

on Cuba?  Winchester Cathedral knocks

the Genoese out of his sodden socks,

for it was born four centuries before.

 

The longest nave in Europe.  Slender threads

of Gothic columns spring like strands of frost

and soar, as if to heaven, till they cross

and mesh to form the vault, high overhead.

 

Cathedrals!  What a glorious invention!

A skeleton as delicate as a wren’s,

with multi-coloured, fragile stained-glass skins,

and all poised like a spring, in graceful tension!

 

Men made it with a plumb-line and a hod,

and genuine desire to honour God.