Saint-Séverin, II

With Notre-Dame, the Sacré-Coeur, and all
the rest, obscure or famous Trinity,
Saint-Julian-the-Poor, Saint-Roch, Saint-Paul
it’s just another Paris church to see.
For we have come too late, I think the call
to holiness will miss this century;
in recent years there’s been another Fall,
with gilded globes of power on the tree.
But tourists go in anyhow, and weave
wide-eyed through pillars, chapels, transepts, apse
and look as though they wished they could believe, acknowledging the truth of human lapse
by what proclaims it visibly, alone:
the weightlessness of ransom wrought in stone.