Notre Dame

Like you, I watched Notre Dame cathedral 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.

Miz Quickly