The Road Beneath Our Feet

Our Lady

The entrance ticket allows for the museum, the baptistery 
and the cathedral. Here, in the cool dark, a humming 
crowd is slowly moving forward. We are told not to use 
the flash and to walk along the suggested itinerary, a small 
corridor winding through the church, marked by red cords.

Leaning against an immense column of stone 
a young girl is reading in a guide, hardly looking up. 
Where are you, God?  I get no answer, except for 
the multilingual muttering of the crowd that is God 
somehow, though skillfully hidden.

Looming from the mid-ceiling, the marbled busts 
of uncountable generations of popes in their lonely 
circle of power. Not far from them, a colorful Mother 
Mary on a small golden icon is nurturing her adult-looking 
child at her left breast, enclosed in a white alabaster altar.

Here, a small group of tourists is instructed by their guide 
about the historical background, names and years, 
nothing I would want to remember. 
Attracted by candlelight, 
I enter a separate chapel where all turns silent.

Only a man and a woman, wistful, both, standing 
uneasy before their own childish prayers. 
She adds a candle, with her desire, to the many,  
and suddenly I understand that it is not a matter of  
eluding our sufferings, but a longing for home.

I wait until they walk away, we are all 
in a row, then, one by one on our given trail, 
between red cords,
we leave the holy place.

— Sabine Pascarelli