Also on the way up the stairs
to Arte Sacra we could hear
the scream two blocks behind us,
where she sat, her hands on the wheel.
A collision! I thought first,
before I saw the car
parked, perfectly fine
while she herself was just screaming
and people were stopping. An elderly woman
pulled on the door, shouted, to no avail,
finally putting her arms over the roof
a kind of comfort through the body of the car.
While we kept walking
into the Portuguese Archbishop's
treasure chamber, gift collection,
the largest of its kind, collected at random.
Wandered around for a while
in the half-darkness, damp smell, among the objects given as gifts
or amends. Cloaks
with threads of gold, sceptres of silver,
the coloured tapestries, pictures of saints, the jewellery.
And the lesser gifts, the ashtrays
in porcelain or plastic
which could be found there
together with the first cross
put in the earth in Brazil, in the year 1500
two slender sticks of rusty iron.

Translation: May-Brit Akerholt