Cheryl Caesar
Letter to Our Lady
Heart of the city’s first heart, you parted
the waters, sent up spires, and bent
over your people with protecting arches.
Inside it was always cool, summer and winter,
with the comforting smell of granite dust.
The windows were blue saturated with red,
red tinged with blue. Like venous
and arterial blood. When I entered,
my breathing slowed, my blood pressure went down.
Inside, the city fell away.
Inside was quiet as the womb.
They say no one set you ablaze
with rags and gasoline, as in Opelousas.
No one pierced your towers with suicide planes.
It just happened—or you did it to yourself,
like that Buddhist monk who haunted my childhood,
self-immolating in a silent, endless loop,
with Watts, with Detroit, then with the Twin Towers.
Now in that silent film I see
towers all over the world falling, one by one.
Silently saying, humans, we can no longer stand for you.
We cannot protect you while you destroy yourselves.
Why do you mourn a building, and burn your world?
Poems by Cheryl Caesar have appeared in Writers Resist, The Mark Literary Review, Agony Opera, Cream and Crimson, Total Eclipse, Prachya, The Trinity Review, The Mojave River Review, Panoply and Winedrunk Sidewalk, among other venues. Caesar holds a doctorate in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She lives in East Lansing and teaches writing at Michigan State University.
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