RUINS:

That place of bats & rosary beads, old & so well fingered,

Where cobwebs draped old life & musty history lingered,

Of curlicues & catkins, in cloisters of ivied filigreed must,

 Place of early Christians, where Christ once asked for trust.

Abandoned by old robed men, those of secret & sealed lip,

Those who once prayed in silence & from Holy chalice sipped,

Those grey monks of long-gone era, now just the walking dead,

Raven upon grinning gargoyle, where he makes his nightly bed.

Clinging to dear life, ivy creeping & embracing sad dead walls,

God blinking from cloisters, through the now non-existent halls,

Echoes of silence, dripping down the cold moss covered stones,

Where graves of long-gone saints bare only the names of bones.

The unforgiving rats scuttle upon the old cracked, unseated pews,

While wind, cobwebs & moonlight dance with the drops of dews,

Where moth & man once lived side by side in old & centuried past,

Where cracking sconces broke the silences, now only stone that lasts.

Here where the word of God was chanted, by the silvery light of moon,

I heard within the shadowy yews, the ancient haunting & passing tune,

Those eons echoing within the icy winds of long-gone & marching time,

I knew then, I had lived here & that these ruins were really & truly mine.