San Casciano in Val di Pesa

Night
Go to the roof of the house and look at the sky,
Capacious, luminous, portentous,
The inside of a great, blue, steel bowl, mixing
Watercolour violet, indigo ink, tincture of cobalt,
OmarKhayyamesque in its glory.
The transparent walls contain us,
Far away from whatever lies beyond:
Infinite space, unimaginable vastness,
The great seas in which the imagination coasts,
Punctuated by stars, illuminated by moonbeams,
Edged by the hills and towers and roofs
Of the black landscape in which we live.
Indistinct are the wavering lines of lights
That zigzag up the hill to Fiesole, under
The black shroud of the northern mountains,
Candles held by an expectant throng,
Silent and waiting in the distance.

Day
The view is sharper in the pearly light of a winter's day.
Pervasive but restrained, it etches out the detail,
Transforms the landscape into green and grey,
Garnished with silver in the sprays of olive leaves
That grow in clumps among the fields; brown
In the serried ranks of vines, Spartan, pruned back,
They endure the winter cold to sprout again
In the warm weather, ridiculously green.
Church bells peal casually and the sound carries out
In endless permutations of clangs, percussive
It rolls around the hills and floods back to us,
On its back the devotions of centuries, for
The Convent bells of the Clarisse have pealed
For twenty-one generations, inexorably
Marking cycles of life and death, death and life.
This land resounds with patience and endurance,
The jugular surge of life, pain and pleasure mixed.

So, wondrously, does the mundane become the sacred.