Meditações - The steeple’s clock

Custodians

Retired from other trades, they wore

Work clothes again to mop the johns

And feed the furnace loads of coal.

Their roughened faces matched the bronze

 

Of the school bell the nun would swing

To start the day. They limped but smiled,

Explored the secret, oldest nooks:

The steeple’s clock, dark attics piled

 

With inkwell desks, the caves beneath

The stage on Bingo night. The pastor

Bowed to the powers in their hands:

Fuses and fire alarms, the plaster

 

Smoothing a flaking wall, the keys

To countless locks. They fixed the lights

In the crawl space above the nave

And tolled the bells for funeral rites.

 

Maintain what dead men made. Time blurs

Their scripted names and well-waxed floors,

Those keepers winking through the years

And whistling down the corridors.

David Livewell