Like you, I watched Notre Dame burn – a thousand years of prayer in the rafters feeding fires hotter than devotion, a millennia’s fervor of hands and fingers pressed together like a flame. “Our Mother” indeed. Though not mine. Nations did not watch, no helicopters overhead filmed what burned in her, how her brilliance consumed and engulfed the prayers of my family, all the wreckage once that light was out. What part of the flame, what color, what heat is insanity? The blue? The white? What raging fuel in the mind – timbers and rafters of the past? Gargoyles like whispering gas jets? They said when she was a girl on the ranch she built a shrine in a corner of the chicken yard and prayed to Jesus every day, on her knees in the dirt, before her brother honked the horn of the school bus he drove at 14. And we mourn. And for a moment together we all pray for something holy to rise back from the ashes. If not our souls, that the stones holding up our walls might be saved.
Originally here.
qbit 
Beautifully rendered poem, qbit. The first stanza in particular is exquisite – perhaps not the right word to use in light of what it’s about!
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Thank you so much!
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It seems that sometimes religiosity and madness keep close company. It’s not always possible for the faithful to get far enough away when it all goes up.
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Yes. For sure.
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Enjoyed this incredibly ‘visual’ poem … yes, we will need the stacked stones.
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Need them for sure.
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this here was the most intreging part:
“They said when she was a girl on the ranch
she built a shrine in a corner of the chicken yard
and prayed to Jesus every day, on her knees in the dirt,
before her brother honked the horn
of the school bus he drove at 14.”
the contrast between the chicken coop church and the work-of-art religious contraption is perfect… perfect.
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