The Angel with the Broken Wing

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,

The one large statue in this quiet room.

The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut

Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.

The docents praise my elegant design

Above the chatter of the gallery.

Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—

The perfect emblem of futility.

Mendoza carved me for a country church.

(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)

I stood beside a gilded altar where

The hopeless offered God their misery.

I heard their women whispering at my feet—

Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.

Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall,

And I became the hunger that they fed.

I broke my left wing in the Revolution

(Even a saint can savor irony)

When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.

They hit me once—almost apologetically.

For even the godless feel something in a church,

A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?

A trembling unaccounted by their laws,

An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.

There are so many things I must tell God!

The howling of the dammed can’t reach so high.

But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,

A crippled saint against a painted sky.