The Stones of Venice

[Recent ekphrastic poem. Hope the stanza breaks come through.]

The Stones of Venice

• after Gentile Bellini’s painting, Procession in St Mark’s Square (1496)

And what effect has this splendour on those who pass beneath it? You may walk from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the gateway of St. Mark’s, and you will not see an eye lifted to it, nor a countenance brightened by it.      

                    – John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1851-53)

We’re in a surreal city, the sky

               unimportant. The wind

                       seems highly selective:

before St Mark’s three branched flags

                            catch a rightward breeze,

         yet three fat flags

                          droop sullenly.

Long funnel chimneys, tops

       like tulips catching rain,

             etch the bit of sky

                like a dream remembered.

Otherwise this mass panorama

                is a rectangle the size

                    of a wall, boxing in

                        a square of humans,

99% men.                Uniform slabs of soldiers

  to the left, colour-coded citizens

           to the right following musicians

                 soundlessly blowing

                      through the paint.

Foregrounded: men of the confraternity who paid,

        white-robed, devoutly expressionless,

the holy relic of Christ’s Cross

              under its golden canopy, frozen

                  in their eight-metre walk

                     to the bliss of nowhere, entranced

                         like us by incense they can’t smell,

teeming bustle they can’t feel, backgrounded

by the brooding symmetries of St Mark’s,

                a holy trinity of three blue domes

topping five arched portals, quintessential,

           glowing beehive-gold, this God

                     architectural, this artist stoned.

~ by Peter Lach-Newinsky on December 17, 2020.