How is the loan different from the knife. Part 4.

Who payed for the Chapel of the Princes
The cathedral dome
The statue of David?

Who took the money
Whose fame blossomed
Because they portrayed Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus,
And the women as Petrarch’s Laura?
	     	
			Art is the highest form of power

We were the racketeers of Firenze
We were the lion of Europe 
Partying on the roof of the palace
Overlooking the city
That reeked of waste in the gutters
The glow of power
Fame if you had something to offer 
Art and culture

Giovanni paid the money 
For John XXIII to buy the office of Cardinal. 
The interest on the loan?
The Medici Bank head of all papal finances.

I spoke out of turn about what he’d said
He turned those slow eyes on me
I’ll never forget and always regret
And I never saw him again
Except for the debt
And the threat of excommunication.
We all owed him money
He was the sovereign  
The monarch of Firenze.

I collected tax on the male children of the family 
Who worked while there was light
And worked into the night
To feed their family on bread, minestrone, noodles and greens.
Living in a single room 
Dirt floor, heap of straw to sleep on.
What did they know about colour, form,
The contours of Donatello?

They crippled the city of Florence
1743 total debt eighty million lira
Humanistic thinking
It gave the elegance of predatory lending
To the desperate poor of 2007.

I’ve sat and listened to them
Twenty floors up
Everyone on the telephone
Cocaine in the back room
All over town
Evidence on the bench top  
Of every bar in town.

Sleek, smooth
Looking out over the city
She said
	Sell it, sell it all
And the numbers tumbled
So too the jobs, then the mortgage
Then the homes, then the family
Then the street.

Boarded up house in a poor part of town 
For sale sign 
Red rusting roof
Back door broken
Dirty dead crackhead in a dirty back room.

Where did they go
The ones who didn’t know
Thought a house was an asset 
What did they think about the promises made?

A home for everyone
Every man a king
Those poor people made poorer
Unemployment, suicide
No hope, no children born 
The government paid out eight hundred billion
To save a bankrupted nation.