Michael T. Young: Cataract

It was only days before that I stood in front of Monet’s Houses of Parliament, 

lifted in its blue flame, burning through water, and clouds, and everything between,

a kind of healing that rises like heat when I sit quietly and remember. 

.

It holds me on the day news breaks of Notre Dame on fire, kindled red 

as the cataracts of Monet’s old age scorching all colors before his eyes. 

And then I remember standing in front of those old stones and feeling 

.

flight in them suspended above spring trees, and hearing angels sing 

not in voices but colors blossoming in a rosette burst between towers, a spire 

needling the sky, that now collapses into the smoldering skeleton, 

.

sending up a plume of gray. Prayers and wonder in these arches flicker 

into smoke and ash, a single, blind beating wing. Believers and atheists alike 

gather in the streets, closing their eyes—not in prayer but for the grace 

.

of memory to hold, a grasping at any image to keep some semblance 

from this beauty, a form to walk through, a light to see by, a way 

to recover from the wound that took the place of the angel that left us.

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Copyright 2019 Michael T. Young