The National Memorial in Prague

They have a worker with a hod
of bricks erected here instead of God.

He seems resolved to be
a worker or be damned.

With visionary gaze like Paul
on the Damascus road, he contemplates

a tenth-floor wall where he will lay his bricks
and consecrate another worker’s flat.

It is a humanist cathedral.
Stained glass commemorates

large peasant women; assorted
Party men in bronze complete

a kind of trinity. The eye is drawn
to the mausoleums of the saints:

the heroes of the anti-fascist war,
the great black tomb of Klement Gottwald,

inscribed in gold. This high conceit,
this godless Vatican, this hymn

to Lenin with its red flags flaming
on the marble stair, presumes to deal

with death as Christians do, whose real
concern and province it has always been.

For since the Nazarene
negated death, they have enshrined

it sacredly, refined their special
forms of homage, and become

the best authorities. They do not state
in stone its plain finality.

These builders, as if not quite sure,
still made a kind of church.

Prague 1964