Deborah Dawkings
The Italian Chapel
Not as conquerors, but as captives,
they came to the Orkneys—
sun-born men in a wind that cuts sideways,
set to fill the causeways,
stitch the islands together
with stone and hardship.
Here, on Land Holm,
they made something else as well:
a chapel—
a miracle assembled from scarcity:
two Nissan huts remade by longing.
Outside, a belfry and the moulded head of Christ
stand in the cold light.
Inside, paint becomes marble,
plaster becomes grace,
and the hand remembers Italy:
arches, the Madonna and Child, a quiet gold
held against the grey.
Eighty years on,
I enter its small astonishment
and feel its weight of making—
how beauty holds its ground.
Orcadians know this.
On their short-grass, wind-shorn islands
they measure worth by what endures:
stone, weather, work,
and the stubborn
tenderness of things
made carefully
in hard places.
