Rain hissed against the stained-glass, turning saints into smears of color—a fractured Virgin Mary, a weeping Peter. The air smelled of damp stone and something sharper, like the metallic tang of a thumb pressed too long against a blade, and the font was shallow with stagnant waters.
The priest found the dead moth pressed between the pages of an old hymnal, its wings brittle as communion wafers. He hadn’t opened the book in years…”don’t ask me, why?” His fingers trembling, he lifted the moth….”Jeepers Creepers, where’d ya get those eyes that look into the soul?”
A draft slithered in from the cracked sacristy door, carrying the scent of wet earth and something older—lichen, maybe, or the slow rot of forgotten wood. His breath hitched when he noticed the footprints leading to the font…”the fisherman from the Sea of Galilee?”
The moth twitched suddenly between his fingers, legs curling as if still clinging to some phantom branch, and that’s when he saw them—those eyes, black and wet as ink blots, staring up at him from the hymnal’s margin. Names scrawled there in trembling script, names he recognized: altar boys, choir members, all gone missing in Vietnam.
Where have all the flowers gone? The priest thought, but his lips didn’t move—his throat had clenched shut before the melody could escape. The moth’s wings unfolded with a dry whisper against his palm, revealing veins like cracks in stained-glass, and beneath them, more names. Names he hadn’t seen in decades. Names he’d buried.
This is a hauntingly deep, dark and meaningful poem. The biblical cross references and the comparison of a month which is naturally attracted by flame and the inquisition that gained infamous notoriety through the cruelty of the stakes are breathtaking! This is poetry at its best, my friend!
Thank you so much, Elke.