Idolatry

I don’t know who built it or when, but the beams,
raw with aging and near-stripped of pigment,
suggest a timeless worship.

We still take our shoes off and set them
reverently on the stones, perhaps wondering if this place
could tell more to our bare skin

than our godless eyes, and we step inward
looking for warmth, tracing our toes
along the scars that line the floorboards

where pews once were, in a time
that our bruising knees long for. The windowless frames
suggest an inside and an outside,

but the ceiling is open like a chest
letting all the sunlight in, and the forest
is asking endlessly, sending trails of ivy

and ushering the moss and lichen to decorate the thresholds,
to find the faint rancid oil of human touch
in the woodgrain, to amend it,

taking God back from the pages
that molder behind the pulpit. Thrown stones
lie in their guilt on the floorboards, summoning

memories of flight and purpose, the gifts
of worthy hands. And the wreckage
of the windows they found lies

in entropic mosaics, chiming scree unsettling itself,
assembling its stains to form a picture of redemption,
quivering in the sunlight,

babbling of its thousand rifts. A wonder
that something broken so long can gleam so lovely
and cut so finely the soles of our naked feet.