Annemarie Austin
Archangel with a Gun
In Jesuit churches like wedding-cake icing
the saints trampled down those infidels and devils,
their croziers clubs, their copes flung violently out.
How they would have liked to conscript this archangel
and set him up as a St Valentine icon at the altar.
Where can we hide now - we in the world below -
when he struts in red and gold on heaven’s ramparts,
the musket dangling from his fingers or aslant
on his brocaded shoulder - Uriel or Michael
armed and beetle-browed under a wide-brimmed hat?
We are ordinary as crows, our black clothes show
the real dust on them. We are fallible perhaps
and let our foreign coins fall in the collection plate
as if they were true pennies. But such a little sin,
a little little thing to bring this vengeance down!
A woman tells her beads against his drawing a bead
on her, on her knees, the rosary flowing over the back
of her hand. A penitent’s pointed cap and paper tunic
are targets in the darker crowd. Millenia or practice
have made him non-pareil among sharpshooters.
God, did you know he had the gun and let him run amok
in the crowded market? The shot ones have toppled
onto boxed apples as if they were starving. The archangel
struts on their unprotesting skulls like Lucifer
in all his pride and the certainty no fall will follow.
Page(s) 38
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