Sagrada Familia
by Jack D. Harvey
Yes, grotty and grotesque
to some dirty-eyed critics
like Orwell, who don't
see the beauty of it.
The pride of Barcelona,
Sagrada Familia,
the basilica itself
a massive dun citadel
soaring
in shadow and light
in bony spired splendor
finely and firmly
in its chosen place;
its immense rigorous
concrete
and Montjuïc stone
from its foundation
rising rising,
piped pinnacles
like overblown bowling pins,
archèvolts, crockets, facades
four towers for the holy Evangelists,
twelve more for the Apostles,
the whole length and breadth
running the table
on what's possible or necessary,
presenting ages
of Gothic art and architecture
in a new way;
its true beginning starts
in the vision
of a humble genius;
God his master and inspiration.
Time passes,
Sagrada Familia grows.
In the lowest of it
new models are shown,
luminous catenaries floating
like upside down candelabra;
the paper plans, the old models, alas,
ravaged in Spain's civil war.
No matter. The basilica grows and grows.
Its fundamental order
a profusion of sacred and profane,
man and beast, saints and sinners,
spaces of angels and devils,
turtles, tortoises, twisted lizards;
far from the stereotyped salamander
in Park Güell, the basilica
inside and outside decorated
in a symphony of styles;
gargoyles and vines
grapes and cold Platonic solids
plain geometrical shapes
magic squares, Subirachs'
sharp cuts to the heart
forging harmony everywhere.
In the perforated towers
tubular sonorous bells
to ring out God's music
and Holy Mother and Himself
above it all, the magnates of heaven,
objects of hyperdulia and latria.
Not a straight line
in the whole kit and caboodle
of concrete and stone tendons
teased out and straining,
supports and pillars bending
into the light of heaven,
honeycombed beehive spires
hyperbolic arches;
from the floor, a forest of columns
leaning every which way
off the vertical.
Sagrada Familia in its maximum conceit,
all of its crazed obvoluted splendor,
Gongorismic obscurity of tense
and time; now is it?
Is it then? Is it always?
We'll never know.
Christ's body
disarrayed and reassembled
into his iconic holiness
overwhelmingly
broods over this Gothic Golgotha,
His child and burden.
And the Spanish civil war
PCE and CNT versus POUM
at each other's throats
on Barcelona's streets,
rampaging through the city's
boulevards, even to la Rambla;
Telefónica falls and anarchy
kills the nervous wires,
the fabric of, even tries
the bony being to be
of the Sagrada Familia
slowly rising
in encrusted corrugated splendor.
Well, it survived that war
and it seems we'll
come to the finish of it
someday, as it trembles
to the underground trains passing by;
the work and thought of many men
but first among them
Antoni Gaudi, the creator,
who started as a Catalonian dandy
obstinately speaking his own tongue
even to kings and heads of state.
Later, through the streets of Barcelona
wandering, dressed like a beggar.
That careless tram did for him
as it nearly did for Frida Kahlo,
wrecked for life.
Steeped in his work
Donchisciottesca Gaudi
persisted insisted
to the end of his end.
Would that his design,
distorted and refined
by his eager epigoni,
by time and technology
comes to a glorious fulfillment,
a surpassing telos.
Que viva Sagrada Familia!
In the fullness
of love and divine purpose
gently carefully
bring it safely
to its glorious plenum.
Bio: Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies. He has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, New York.
