Mary is your Queen

 While I listen to all the grumblings in the pew, old women intent on inspecting my behavior, whispering, sunk in gossip, wiping, righteous wicked women, demonize me after every Mass, realize, loose the essence of the service, focusing instead on how they’d go about wiping my seat because I’ve refused to wipe it. I don’t know which is worse but Mary is their Queen.

Blow-ups, blowing by blown marriages, mine is bad, it’s our second, betrayed, she’s left me again, loving son more than me and he’s four past twenty three, hers is a sickness, it’s for good, so she claims, but we’re Catholic but not in this case and so I cut the beard for her favor but should have kept it but it’s crept back before and so I surrender our separation to the Sovereign hand of the King, Mary is my Queen.

Faithful but cynical sons celebrating the kill shots of militant vigilante gunmen this crisis, consigned to Hell, video loops of small pockets of fire and flare ups played over and over you’d think it was the whole world, streets stripped of saneness, senseless, something is amiss, police missing from the scene, to be there a great risk, what to make of this sin, how to handle this sin, charges of systemic racism, defiant young men doomed to hell, indecency their bloodline except Mary is their Queen.

Ladies using exercise mats move into parking lots like flash mobs gathered to flex muscles and a junked up junkie bunking on a street bench doesn’t know what’s going on next except I drive by and she’s gotten up to walk and so we see each other’s faces and it’s in that moment when I pass her that I say: Mary is your Queen.

Gary Edward Geraci

I Made a Vow

Like a landscape that changes only in 

Plantings there is permanence, favorite 

Corners, where shelter, sound, and smell collide.

Colors are textures of flying things landing 

Then alighting in flight. Yearly, fresh lite 

Mulch, small renewals, death then replanting,

New growth. Inevitable attacks of 

Invading army ants menace and men 

Threaten my guests. Biting flies and blood-suck

Invaders bent on bending Truth demolish

Trust with gray heat waves of deprivation.

Armed with hose and spray I regain lost ground,

The upper hand. I’m not going anywhere.

I do not change house every ten years.

Gary Edward Geraci

Coward, Coward!

I watch you get a running start and then unload upon an injured man sitting in the street. A broken man beaten, hurting, and in shock - your kick from behind, orchestrated, a running start, a foot planted squarely into the man’s jaw, knocking him flat, knocking him unconscious, yet you knew all along, you knew you were being filmed.  

Your blatant disregard is for His image.

God’s image, written into this very man. But you carried out your attack as if your foot was engaging a football, a mere object of recreation, rather than the reality of a delicate head and face, already suffering injury, a head and face cradled by a mother, kissed by a wife, caressed by a child.  

“You’re a coward, you are a coward!” screamed a girl to me sometime later after learning that I had followed the coaxing of my seventh grade peers and had lobbed my fist into the head of a boy, the twin, Alex, I think was his name, giving him a bloody lip.  And when he turned around to look at me, his attacker, he looked 

pained, not from the cowardly blow I had inflicted while his back was to me, but pained from the fact we knew each other and I had chosen to betray our friendship. For what? For the shallow glory the mob would give me.  For joining in on “the fight.” Whatever the hell that meant I never figured it out.

Gary Edward Geraci

Can’t Kill My Soul

Virus, protestors violent, race riots and

It’s just July, outcries, the demons would have 

Me write about this surge of house flies, I stand,

A dried brown scorpion corpse on the floor, halve

Here, harmless severed stinger there, away, grand

Guardian angel keep me, I look up and laugh

For Christ’s Cross keeps the devil’s face under, 

Over watchful eyes of my heavenly Mother.

Gary Edward Geraci

Transfigured!

Joy, joy, joy oh tripartite joy!

On winged insects bathing plumage feast,

Flown from forests, over fields of beast,

Drawn to gurgling fountains falling, toy

Landscapes of castled estates a boy

Dreams of sharing, her laughter his peace.

Requite love, pure and free, not to cease,

Not to flicker, nor to fail - enjoy!

One Whom time does not diminish

Unites their souls, bodies transfigured,

Weary no more, without depletion,

Life springs forward in form and finish.

Highborn, transcendent at Tabor, fed

By Christ and through Christ, take completion.

Gary Edward Geraci