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The frescos
They were painted in difficult times,
Under mad popes, and bad, and peri-celibate
Priests who sometimes changed their minds.
And surely then the painters laughed,
Drinking good wine, breaking good bread:
Their devotion was a cheerful thing.
Now, here, scrubbed, stripped sometimes
To the synopia, surveyed by smileless
People with catalogue in hand
They stand: a product whose validity
Time has changed several times,
Naked aliens in a foreign land.
Battersea 1967
Reworked: Somerset 1997
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