Late Afternoon in the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe
By Joe Milosch
Sitting in the barrio church,
I look at the altar window.
It is a pale October evening,
but now its rainbow-colored shore
glows in the stained-glass.
Standing mast-like in a boat,
Christ looks toward land as he turns
red at sunset. He doesn’t look
like a carpenter’s son
any more than the men around him
look like fishermen;
any more than the man
I saw drinking from a bottle
looked like a refugee
as he rested near the south side
of the metal barrier on the border.
Wearing his Padres cap
slightly off center, he seemed
to study his shadow.
If someone from north of the border
shook the hand of this man,
their shadows would blend
and speak from the dust:
“We are the earth, mined, tilled,
and worked to exhaustion.”
Here, the gardener rinses
the stained-glass
and interrupts my thoughts
about men, land, and the sun.
Rubbing the cross of my rosary,
I kneel beside the aisle of marble tiles;
their broken pattern becomes
a landscape of farms
in my home state.
Looking up at the face of Christ,
I see watery traces
leading from his blue eyes to
the lead-bordered edge of his jaw,
and there, droplets fall unnoticed
among roses, stones, and soil.
Joe Milosch graduated from San Diego State University. His poetry has appeared in various magazines, including the California Quarterly. He has multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and he received the Hackney Award for Literature. He has two published books: The Lost Pilgrimage Poems and Landscape of a Hummingbird.
Photo by Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash.