Day of the dead
By Patrick T. Reardon
Lucy in black
on the arm of Child,
telling him emergency love stories.
One-Cent in the choir loft,
singing each antiphon of an Ave,
recorded once by GirlJane,
on the Gloria Mundi album,
engineered by Thomas Jefferson Cray,
syncopated with a 1972 song about a
dead skunk, dead skunk, dead skunk,
compared by critics
to Dylan’s “Rainy Day Woman”
— nicknamed “Rainy Day Ave.”
The tall daughter
in the front pew by her Governor father,
before a bank of microphones,
photographers and videoists
cavorting about the altar for a shot,
her words asking for solitude.
It is true that Denmark
was in the dark in back,
head down in his hands
on the pew top before him
although no one saw him or,
seeing, recognized him.
Hambone tripped over a flat gravestone
on the way to the simple circle of steel
with its single, ever-burning flame and
its life-size replica of Epstein’s Jacob and Angel,
subject of another Girl song
stutter-stepped with lines
from Handel’s opera The Lost Tribes
— metal kneelers already in place
for the mourner-fans now and to come.
The twin watched from a distance.
This poem originally appeared at BarBar on 3.26.25.
Written by : Patrick T. Reardon
For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.