Out of town to view some painterly seascapes: the building's closed. We trudge back hot for art: the galleries are bare. White space has blanked out carpets, silver, jewels.
Nothing for it but next door: the disappointing living dead, the dusty glass, the ponderous lofting of a dinosaur.
Then in the gloom of ending day a sudden bolt of blue. We peer, heads close and see the whole of this lost afternoon restored to glory in a tiny triptych.
Lapis, gold-festooned. Italianate, sun-dowered, but displayed beside the battered wood of an abused Madonna – English, circa 1300.
So it's ours. Each quiet country church so plain and unassuming, spare and light showed once like this. Such gilded glories illuminated village lives, till a king's whim eclipsed the sun. Bruised saints, white-plastered walls are our inheritance: a cleansing force.
With brilliant capability of being hidden in a pocket, held in the protecting curve of a handspan, this small splendour has survived the smash and grab of centuries. We have not.
Our sensibilities have been limewashed away until a taste for purity, clean lines, clear spaces pared down vision, has replaced as though god given the ecstasy of colour and the dream of faith.
Joy Howard lives in West Yorkshire. Her poems have been published in several anthologies, and in a recent pamphlet, Second Bite (2007). She is the co-founder and current editor of Grey Hen Press www.greyhenpress.com