Millions

A million hapless feet

Have trod here.

Many have been attached

To humans.

These are tiles familiar

And polish-worn.

This is a spot where

People stop.

Maybe, some think, maybe

People stand here

Because the stained-light

Is perfect,

That at certain times of day

The rays are soft

The dust-motes dance to

Blessed streams;

That the air, and the stone,

And the saints

And the pews and the pulpit

Are aligned.

Here, this spot, where millions

Of minds, or

Slippery-defined souls at least

Have felt

An elusive something, or someone,

Or a force

Which some call love

Or God,

Or both; even those people,

Disbelievers

Or unbelievers, no matter,

Feel it.

It is in Westminster Abbey.

You know it

Maybe from a dream, or a friend,

or instinct.

Below this spot were once steps

Now bricked over

And forgotten, by design

Or awe.

If these stairs were uncovered

You would see

They descend into a darkness

Strange-hold.

At the bottom of twenty-eight

Or a thousand

Stairs is a bricked-up

Door, heft-hewn.

Nobody has dared to descend

Since Gaudi or

Before him Blake, and

John of Patmos.

They knew that the Abbey

Was not built

On this spot accidentally.

They felt it.

It drove men mad; souls, too.

The truth is

That the abbey grew

From this spot.

Behind that door lies a catacomb

Where no dust

Has ever settled or flown

In light.

It is the Form of darkness:

Plato was right.

Impenetrable by man

Or soul.

Nonetheless, inside this crypt

Is another room

And inside that, a lead box

and another.

Even in this unsettling nothing

A force plays

Inside that sealed box:

Man’s best.

If that box, in the box, in the room,

In the crypt,

Behind the bricked-up door

Down stairs

Underneath the bricks and marble

Under the feet

In a particular spot where people stop

In the Abbey

Was opened, it would yield this:

A photograph.

Of a sweeping wing, metallic

And mathematic

And organic but clearly

Not from Earth

Or of earth, for that matter.

Blue, red:

More Forms. The essence of blue

And of red

The very essence of a wing

Perfection.

A photograph. A portal

Into another place

Which bleeds its power into

This place.

A place. A vibration. A dimension.

These concepts are

Not sufficient. It is alive;

Or life.

A human mind, or soul, can always

Rationalise

And creative geniuses on two feet

Are happy

To speculate: some call it God, aliens, infinity:

George Lucas

Saw it in a dream and made movies

About it

Spielberg and Kubrick too were touched

By a half-

Remembered glimpse of a vision in

A dream.

Joseph Smith so wanted to believe

In a rumour

That he went mad in a forest and created

More words.

Governments covered its existence up

So well that

There once existd a Ministry of Silence

That has

Been so effective at burying the portal-photo

In shreds of

Paperwork, obsolete hard drives, forgotten passwords

And Freemasonry

That the Ministry itself forgot what

Its use was

And shut itself down in a frenzy of

Cost-efficiency.

DaVinci maybe knew of its existence

And was wise

To steer clear: he reckoned that this

Photo-portal

Was a way to unlimited power, technology

And all that.

But he believed in human ingenuity

Too much

To want to take short cuts.

In any case

To gaze into the sun is to

Go blind.

So above this spot in an Abbey

Which grew from

The leaking power of a portal, maybe more,

Or less

Than what some people call Heaven,

Valhalla,

Another level of consciousness, and

So on,

A million feet pass, stopping to shiver

With happy awe

At the makings of man and the offerings

To infinity.

Armies fight. Battles are won. Wars are lost.

People are killed.

Governments rise. Money is spent,

People die.

Some are richer than others. The richest

Of them all

Are those who know wealth

Is within.

In the meantime, people go to work

To buy things

To try and achieve something that is

Always and

Tragicomically out of reach. It is

As useless

As trying to halt the spin of

The Earth

And each soul or mind fundamentally

Knows of this.

For the longer the portal is buried

Down there

The more of its power or compelling nature

Leaks through and

Into our world. The more we forget it is

Down there

The more shocking-special its effects

Will be when

Or if. Or how. Or by whom it

Is released.

For one day, there will be restoration.

No matter that

This place is not from the hand

Of man;

Man is good at building and rebuilding

And compelled

Always so to do. And one day

Therefore

The tiles will be jemmied. The steps discovered

The door seen

And unbricked. The catacomb lit by flame or laser

To reveal

In a room, within which is merely a box

In a box:

A photo, or a portal, with a picture

Of a wing.

And all who gaze on it will recall the history

Of mankind

Will be imbued with the death and magic

And love

Of a million generations. This is the truth

Of the portal.

And the next day, or the same day,

People arrive

To weld the box shut. To encase it in plastics

And to build

New rooms within rooms

Bricked up

Stairs filled in with concrete and clay

Forever, or

As long as the folk memory of the tales

Of those

Who once gazed on this picture or portal

To somewhere

Remain as echoes in the tangled forest

Of human

Thought. And then a million more feet,

Some human,

Will pass above this forgotten spot: not knowing why,

They will

Stop.