These days, people build their saviours.

Angels are made in factories,

hauled into the sky with cranes.

Nothing controversial-

the shape of man retained.

Stapled to the blue

like we’re scared the world will forget us.

But no sexuality

scars the fluidity of form,

no face to send a shiver

through the pages of a Bible.

Though his kind won’t be found in Acts or Job,

in Jeremiah. His voice, if he had one,

would utter one word: “man”.

His wings might slice the sky with red

but flight is a dream that flickers

behind the agonising wish to stoop,

to pull the fields he guards ceaselessly

up to his chin,

rest his iron-heavy head in the hills.

Tourists crawl around his feet,

a never-ending stream of company.

Their voices too thin and fragile to reach him.

Sometimes he thinks he feels a shout

tingle through a toe he doesn’t have.

But his is an itch

that will never be scratched,

even if he’d been blessed with hands.

Though sometimes,

when the sun warms him,

he thinks he might know

what it would feel like,

the pride that stiffens his spine,

the pride with which he stamps the sky.