♪♪
-After St. Paul's Cathedral burned down,
Ma still drove us to mass.
Held in an old bingo hall,
the liturgy came on folding chairs,
kept time with the slapping sounds of small kid feet
on DuraFlex floors.
Of course, I did not know then, though should have guessed it.
The old Gothic facade was quarried basalt
from the Cowiche Canyon.
On a different island, all my kasamas feet red,
the whole barkada a muddy mess.
Everyone knows a joke about fat lips and flat noses.
As a matter of course, the lava flow followed us.
The older Filipino women in the portico are my aunties.
When the firefighters broke into the already smoking church,
they found the altar already aflame.
Too dangerous for Father Royce to retrieve the Eucharist,
the 100-year-old domed ceiling caved in.
A man, depending on charity,
searched for a shirt from the clothing bin,
lighting his way with a match or a BIC.
He couldn't remember,
so he was fined $4.4 million,
and spent three years in Idaho Maximum Security.
Stacks of soot-slick stones were all that was left in the end.
We knelt on hard ground.
♪♪
-Read more of Dujie's prize-winning poetry
on their website.
♪♪
Catch Art Zone, Fridays nights at 8 and anytime online at seattlechannel.org/artzone