Camp Dei Fiori 1600

CAMPO DEI FIORI 1600


The martyrdom, the men
who set the pyre burning,
the miracle workers who plied the crowd
healing dog distemper,
the pious nuns who watched a brother burn,
Field of the Flowers, Holy Rome,
and God knows what they were thinking
if they were thinking
and who knows what God was thinking,
his pearly fingernails overhead we read as sky
into which the smoke of all our love
and learning
passes as it burns away,
a lean little man called Brown is burning
whose crime was to try to measure
thinking, the shadows of ideas,
touched the terrible shadow of God.


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2005