All you want to do is trace your finger over the ribbed outline of Mother Mary, trapped in cathedral glass. But she is exalted on the wall, the kind of beauty that you can never really reach. Shapes tessellate the window, like sunlight at the bottom of a rockpool, but in beautiful cellophane colours, and warmly translucent. Regardless of one’s religion, who could argue against the extraordinary beauty of cathedrals. Of course people marry here.

The glass is stronger than brittle. The white light allowed through is humbled into its constituent colours, painting the floor iridescent. A holy high roof occasionally blessed by birds. I was baptised in a cathedral, and all the rest, and will likely marry in one; have my funeral in one. I don’t think I believe in God, and I’m not sure of any Providence, but for me, Mother Mary is not a spirit, but a warm blanket on cold nights. Jesus is not a god, but that reminder in your head, when you’re caught in a downpour, to smile at the decision to leave your umbrella at home, because you haven’t had a true shower like this in years, and you have never felt more liberated. I think that’s what the disciples were talking about. The Buddhists, Taoists, Judaists, Muslims, I think that’s what they meant when they spoke of enlightenment and faith, but it all got muddled somewhere along the way.

Hahaha, very clever, I must say. You want us to overthink this- try and correct every grammar ishue until it makes less sense and trick us into giving up- but it will not work.

Can there be a thing smaller than an atom? No, so this is nothing. Perhaps it was supposed to be translated to 'bigger than an atom'? Well, that is anything and everything. Does that narrow it down? Absaloutly.

It is the most cunning, strongest, highest, lowest, smartest- is it any or all? Only one thing goes with all.

Now, that answer- it's simple. What finds everything around you, can think anything, can be the most cunning, strongest, highest, lowest and smartest, and be filled with nothing, and, at the end of a life, be nothing?

Your mind, of course- your brain.

Am I right?

Newly picked bouquets

line a fence, post to post,

by the beach - this must have been

the place she loved the most.

I stop to read inscriptions,

letters to a muted mind;

a last breath, a final footprint

on the Earth to which we bind.

A park bench and a silver plate

the centre of its back.

A loved one's sweet initiative

or a dying wish perhaps.

I read the rusted silver,

message ground in ivory letter:

"Our brightest flower, Jasmine.

Loved by anyone that met her."

'Two thousand six to twenty-ten',

said the weeping park bench tile.

I wonder all the folk who've read

this ode to taken child.

When the beach bouquets are wilted,

will someone take them from the posts?

Those dying flowers, the sobbing ink;

ghostly tributes to a ghost.

When the park bench cracks and faulters

and the reaper plays his role,

will someone save the dedicate

to a disembodied soul?