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.