Monday Sonnet: Sanctis

My springs are dry, and that half-mad ambition
Which drove me to combust my years in verses
Has left me for some younger rhetorician.
Your spark and fulgor only now reverses
The Byzantine decay of my poetics.
I’d been reduced to lowly crafts, to buy
My bread with tricks, to drag in mud aesthetics;
And now I build cathedrals made of sky,
And churches made of autumn and of light.
My flesh is their foundation and their stone,
Your name their Sanctis, infinitely slight,
The music with no sound that shakes the bone;
You are the lips that whisper Virgin Mary,
What's left within a tired missionary.