Edmund Prestwich
Church of Ayia Anna
No lock - a piece
of frayed string twisted
over the handle, knotted
carefully round two nails,
is all that keeps the door
from banging in the wind.
We unpick it, entering
a whitewashed shed. A broom
stands in a back corner,
candle-ends in tins
and half a dozen chairs.
Over the altar,
eight-hundred-year-old frescos,
modest, fragmentary,
must owe their half-surviving
through plunder and atrocity
to small chance mercies;
above all the unob-
trusiveness of this House
of God, who bends,
luminous and gentle,
out of a patch of blue.
Page(s) 39
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