As evening and darkness advances
new images capture and haunt,

the view with two surviving steeples
is their pitch-black perfect design set

in relief by the flames rising behind.
Newsreaders are lapping up too

trying to find more ways to describe,
using school and holiday French

as touchstones of real and competing
empathies, invoking this holy and

spiritual week when interviewing those
who can speak as if real by living there;

they also then ask why as a guest writer
explains fires in his novels’ make-believe.

It is no singular fault this is so empty
when the first spire’s fall has said it all,

bells and organ inside silent in demise
and superlatives still fighting for words.