Holiness, Again

Waiting to board at gate D60,

a young woman clutches a German

passport in one hand and, with the other,

secretly tickles a dark-tanned child’s

foot as he sleeps in his mother’s lap.

I’m trying to explain holiness

again (still), and because I’m sitting

in an airport I’m certain to fail.

Though conditions could be worse,

she could be French, kneeling in the Basilique

du Sacré-Cœur, a church with silence

enough to pull any American in,

away from the musicians and living

statues, the skyline view of Paris,

and say a prayer cobbled together

from life as a CEO Christian

(Christmas and Easter Only),

an almost-atheist who stumbled

into a Jesuit university and kept on

stumbling. Days before graduation,

a teacher explained poetry

makes small moments holy. Then

she told me I could eat ice cream

for breakfast the rest of my life

if I wanted. Je voudrais crème glacée.

I proposed to my wife at Sacré-Cœur,

wandering its marmoreal bones,

Love is us graffitied inside its cupola skull.

But all that’s useless as the airport.

No one gets engaged in Paris

and the truth is never sufficient

reason to tell a story. Instead, read

the distance between finger and toe,

the silent horror in the German’s blue

eyes at being caught and the mother’s

brown orbs flashing from fear to anger

before softening. Consider the sleeping

child who will never know how fiercely

and strangely he was loved in that moment,

the unexplainable ice cream he will wake to.