Iglesia

My mother calls me from Hialeah
where she lives as a widow
to say the church in our old
neighborhood in Calabazar, Cuba
finally fell. I can't remember
any church; I can't let her know
I don't know what Iglesia
she's talking about. The church,
she says, the little one we passed
on the bus each time we went
into old Havana, St. Francis
inside a fountain, dried out, cracked
cement, plaster, the splatter
of pigeon feces on his robe--that
church with the crater-sized holes
on its caved-in roof--the one people
said bats roosted in the rafters
when rain fell, showers streamed
on to the devotees who still came
to pray in darkness and wet,
la ultima iglesia that stood against
disbelief, intolerance, hatred,
all the sorrows, that church
of weeping walls, of emptiness
and broken things, that church
in the dim of memory, that church.

copyright 2002 Virgil Suarez