PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Getting there was the penance.

Ariving was like stepping into 

a somewhat disappointing heaven 
where saints and Virgins looked 
real enough but didn't move or speak, 
but lived in worlds that could have been 
royal mausoleums or giant jewelry boxes or 
Nero's daydream, 
though the pews reminded you this was 
business and not pleasure, now and not 
eternity.

My first shrine: too young to know it 
wasn't a playground with kneelers and 
statues. That grotto where I enjoyed 
lighting candles. A smell like vanilla, 
vague charcoal and holy death, and the 
beauty of light-wings beating against 
ruby glass: those tiny souls trying to 
break out of miniature purgatories.

I'd take a long match and with a touch, a 
new soul was born. Such power in my hands.

The people at shrines: very young, very old. 
Some damp polka-dotted ladies I can now 
imagine in Bermuda shorts stalking heavenly 
buffets in Miami malls. And nuns, all black 
with cardboard-like trim; real-life statues 
that never looked sad or quite happy. 
I wondered about their world, 
and yet I didn't wonder.

Other kids all laced and ribboned and clothed 
in purity . . . a type of telepathy going on: 
how long you in for?

The shrines of youth--immense yet small, 
rhinestones sparkling at the bottom of a 
deep dark well.

Late-night benedictions. The gold of candlelight 
praising the gold on the altar. Lovely chanting 
I couldn't understand and didn't need to.

Incense swarming in my nostrils: 

luxurious, deep ebony, ancient, 
a scent that stilled the violent spirits for 
a time.

There is a shrine in the mountains; 
a leafy sanctum just below the clouds-- 
a river cuts through it, cuts twice: 
the earth like acid, my boredom like a 
dancer.  

And in those days the sky was endless 
dessert too sweet for this world. 
And a smooth white Jesus greeted the 
pilgrims with open arms as if to say, 
place your pain here, upon this chest, 
here is the secret place injustice hasn't
found yet.

How wonderful if the sky absorbed all 
the world's pain the way a lake draws 
the sky into its luminous soul, if pain 
was some sort of prayer and 
didn't merely collect in the air like 
fumes and cleverly asphyxiate the world 
by inches.

Prayers flow upwards, reach higher places. 
Prayers are the evaporated cares of 
simmering hearts.

How wonderful if pain was more than just 
evil's grandest shrine.

The shrines of my blossoming years: 
noticed the clothes the women wore and 
antique frescoes of pastel apostles, 
The Judgement Day when God will sort 
out those like us and those like them.

Shrines were now museums where I learned 
about fashion, art and fear.

Left home in '79. 
Out there was a big shrine 
of reality waiting, 
a playground with offices and 
department stores.

Though I found it a rather 
disappointing heaven. 
And I became a pilgrim 
searching for a place 
where howling words don't come 
out in the night, where something 
grander than life, like the sight 
of Renaissance cherubs, the scent 
of sable smoke, a tiny burst of flame, 
can take me home.

by Patricia Joan Jones