Let's workshop this poem about the transformation of sacred spaces in a rapidly changing and increasingly secular world--transformations, however, that retain a ghostly presence of the past.
Whispered Hymns
Rent rising despite
congregations dwindling
like dawn stars, worship
spaces now serve
corporate meetings
by day and booty bashes
by night—events
divorced from the faith
that consecrated the stone,
the stained glass, snatching
a few unlikely eyes
like a ghost.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right).