A certificate of some sort: a baptismal blessing?
Christ, wooden as his cross
backed by blood red satin.
Screen-printed suffering, surrounded by saints.
Stripped of Byzantium’s ecstatic colors,
no longer bright with the blue and gold of heaven.
A negative, reduced to black and white, then
framed with strident orange Cyrillic script.
Layered inside, someone’s personal splinter
of the One True Cross
stains a hollow halo behind the rood,
a dull, sallow substitute for salvation.
Now ritual’s replaceable, turned trivial by ease.
Abandoned in a purgatory of antiques
(dingy doilies, tarnished silver),
stiff saints stare imperturbably out,
blasé about their chances.
Author’s note: The poem refers to an item that in ordinary times would be a holy object of the Easter-Rite antimension, but which I found at an antique store amidst assorted household linens.
Jessi Peterson is a youth librarian who lives in a western Wisconsin with her husband and 3 cats. She enjoys baking, beekeeping, and listening to coyotes sing. Her work has previously appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Wisconsin People & Ideas and Sky Island Journal.
© 2024, Jessi Peterson
Halfway Down the Stairs 