larryhammer | With apologies for the delay, but the rough draft was ... very rough (Reply)

Tuesday, 28 Oct 08

When I left off, I'd barely gotten started
Describing my own Switzerlandic scene
When lazy patience broke, and so we parted;
Now, to fulfill my promise: telling where we've been.
I'll skip my setting this time, for it's mean --
A transatlantic flight, the middle seat;
I'd rather reminisce about what's neat.

But how to slice this journey into bites
That I can chew in free and easy rhyme?
By altitude -- the sights arranged by heights?
By types of cheese we tasted at the time?
Pure chronologic's a poetic crime:
That's just the skin, and here I need the bones.
I'll organize this by cathedral stones.

We took in several münsters on this trip,
You see -- such as Geneva's Church St. Peter,
Where Calvin preached (a landmark I could skip),
A good old gothic pile -- as such I greet her,
Saddened a neo-classic facade could defeat her.
It's cosmopolitan, just like the city --
As architecture, it is such the pity.

Beneath the floor is better than what's over:
The church's archeology is on display,
Extensively, what walls they could uncover
Layered pre-Roman to the gothic day --
A city's broken labyrinth, silent, says
(Excuse the rhyme, but we've hit turbulence)
It's always a busy place, and will be hence.

That one was better food than Zürich's three
Snacked up one morning near the railway station:
The Romanesque Grössmünster, supposedly
Founded by Charlemagne's own proclamation;
Another Peter's Church, quite Reformation;
Fraumünster's modern neo-gothic hall
Redeemed from plain by stained-glass by Chagall.

Perhaps we should have given them more time,
But we'd no mind to linger in the rain
That, even over, chilled our tower climb
To see (by hills) we weren't on a plain.
-- And yet it rained in Basel, when again
We visited the Münster on the hill
And stayed for hours -- it enchanted still:

Red gothic sandstone soared above the nave,
Solidly thick from crypt to upper spire,
And monuments such as Erasmus' grave;
Carousel music echoed in the choir
And through the window, a ferris wheel swept higher
Than towers rising in the Rheinish air --
The Platz was hosting part of the Fall Fair.

But what of Interlaken? There were no
Cathedrals there -- just Alpine majesty:
The walls, unworked, were massifs topped with snow,
And slanted light stained meadows autumnly --
A church of Nature there for all to see.
But here, we've landed -- both my plane and verse.
I'll end with this before the stewards curse.

(BTW, I'm disappointed

movingfinger, at the very least, didn't take me to task for the non-rhyme of Käse/plaza in my first installment. Ay is not ah.)

ETA: part three.

---L.