The Night Service by Robert Nisbet

St. Mark's Cathedral, Seattle

At the compline service, above the altar, a huge wheel,
its glass stained warm ochre, the spokes silver.
In pews and around the altar, the students sit.
They've come in threes, in twos, Noah's people.
They've come in T-shirts, skimpy pants, with
the long bronzed legs of a hot summer.
Nine-thirty. To the chancel come eleven
choristers, black, monastic. Clerical crows.
They fling their liturgies of worship into
the bated joy beneath that large brown wheel.
The celebrants, benign, absorb it all.
Some massage another's shoulders, ease hence
the cares, maybe the sins, of earth and world.

The service over now, they walk silently out.
The evening's incense scent is swamped
just briefly by the faintest smell of sweat.
The air’s still warm, but above us still
that huge brown wheel stakes out its presence
in a darkening night sky

* This poem appeared in Verse-Virtual in 2014 and in my chapbook Robeson, Fitzgerald and Other Heroes (2017).

Robert Nisbet lives in the UK, in rural Wales, about as far as you can get from London, travelling West. His poems have been published widely in Britain and the USA, including regular appearances in San Pedro River Review and Third Wednesday.