_6. Volterra

I went to an ochre city
in a month of wandering.
I walked: up the cobbled
hill, down alley, down steps.
I sat: in a baptistry
in its eight hundredth year,
round and alabaster white
on its unadorned facade.
In the basin men were dipped
and receive the germ of the
holy spirit. Now the tile
cistern is empty; above it
Christ still raises a hand
and holds his thin cross.
Below him where once was water
are pilgrims’ coins.

When I quit the church I sat
on the city’s steps and
peeled an orange:
the hold spirit. Below
the Tuscan farmland
bore its fruit, and
some ten miles off windmills turned
on their precipice of hope.