Читать книгу Now You Care - Di Brandt - Страница 13

Because the millennium has ended. Because the children have taken over the monasteries, and filled them with fishnets, wildflowers, paper lanterns, donkeys made of straw.

Because Our Lady of the Prairies stepped down off her pedestal last August, walked across the yellow stubble fields in her white silk dress, and didn’t come back.

When the rivers flooded and the grass along the banks turned black, and the mosquitoes came, billions of them, to plague us.

Our first born, daughters, angry as hell at our parental betrayal of them, we didn’t know, we didn’t know.

At the poetry festival, all the young women wore violets and goldenrod in their hair.

They said the house was haunted, and it was, the dead walking through it, dazed, in black and red velvet, the children screaming at them, joyful and afraid, the monks sullen, retreating in the shadows.

Alissa, alone among the children, stared back at the ghost bride in her faded brocade, let the white gloved hand of death touch her cheek, and didn’t flinch. Her memory welling up in her like a flame, spider knowledge.

You were there, then, with red hair, carrying one of the dead over your shoulder, and your aura of sadness, in all that commotion, cut a wave of silence in the air.

Who knows why anything happens? Or how lucky we are, in spite of these alarms, these signs of an era ending, and new beginnings?

The spirits have been good to us, have visited us, with blessings, in spite of our inattention, our distractedness, and yes, we are grateful, we are deeply grateful, though we have forgotten the words for this prayer, this alleluia, this amen.