Tourists filing out of the Sistine Chapel - Morgan Harper, April 2009Surely, Michelangelo painted it,
Botticelli completed it, and
Janitor wiped down the windows for it, but
who am I?
Yes, I am here, but I am barely here.
Unworthy, undeserving, and burdened.
with an internal question of my place:
Who am I to be here?
I am perplexed with man's explication of
God,
and a metanoia of human identity--
one I appreciate, but have failed to comprehend.
It is a portrait
a promise and
redemption of something vague that
I am not certain I understand nor
if it were ever intended for me.
And here today, all must hail the
Italian security guard--high and high on his
assigned pedestal, he is trained to tame bands of
(gelato-filled Trevi-awed brochure-clutching camera-happy)
explorers who are
timeless and hungry
"In Rome."
And I among them, is just as credulously here,
fighting to experience what the postcard exclaims.
I am here dangling Eliot at my side who
taught me that the
women coming and going are in fact
real, but in actuality should seem more like
mannequins to me
(appealing, but no desire ever to become).
But had Eliot been here today, had he
lived this burden, had he himself
stroked the delicate hairs of the
cyst-like apathy
growing on the foreheads his own kind,
what then would he have written of us all?
What would he have written of you, Sistine,
too exhaustive to eternalize?
What would he have made of you--
once a mantle of stars, now a doormat to mankind?
