Strains of the rarest skies

Our Ladies Of Kingdoms To Come

In glorious morning sunlight as golden as the Devil’s silver tongue, the church women plan their afterlives on the cozy café couch. I overhear their velvet conversations, burgundy and corduroy, chaffed in the simultaneous chitter of sparrows in a catless world.

Heaven shall be duly redecorated and made wholly right in their image. Harps will be inlaid with new appointments designed to accent subtler light on seraphic strings. Streets shall have flowerpots burgeoning with verdance and everblossom every ten feet and the robes of its gleaming citizens pressed and scented with strains of the rarest skies shimmering in nameless hues refracted in storied dusks and legendary dawns.

In their next world, the sun sets on cue and stars and moons may be arranged to suited tastes. Novae and comets can be dragged and dropped to fill whatever lonely voids might require them. Unbeholdable beauty shall eclipse every fear they unwittingly smuggled in until they can safely ignore that they indeed exist, even here.

With their holy books littered between crumbcake and red-stained cup rims, keys resting their precious jangles, reading glasses polished and placed precisely at the ready, I want to take each of their over-lotioned faces in my strong hands, parse them with soft kisses and tell them I love them, that I love their visions, the planned improvements they conspire to make, that value accrues in rapture.

Perfection is an eternal pursuit, even for the gods. They ask only our aid in this endless obsession in attaining that which was created to elude them. That is why they made us in our own image, that they might accept our misplaced blame and relieve the mind of such inconsequential and unnecessary burden. And this is why my seated heart genuflects before these ladies, these dear ladies, who would see to it my soul might be comforted and comfortable in the blissborne Paradise as they go forth to prepare a place for me.

Joseph Gallo
February 20, 2006