The Mayas of Colemnar Viejo for the last twilight hours

of early May exist in mature thoughts, statues unable to address

the questions designed to unseat their repose from

spectators marching  into shadows.  By night they will

know the answers that will secret their lives, grateful for

Ermita de Remedios for the revelation and insight that will

allow them to play until the miracle appears. Their mothers

will bless them, remembering their time when it was their duty

to stay still enough to hear God breathe and acknowledge

the old beehive for pollinating wildflowers for their throne.

The Mayas flower with the secret whispers passed down

from grandmothers to mothers to daughters from before

when Maia echoed to a month, when she was the very flow

of the vegetable world, the monthly blood, Pleiades nights,

the first fingers of cotton lavender, narcissus, spurge,

and hyacinth poking the spring bloom with shy joy, until

adult enough to be a proper escort for  mute child queens.

Her aura surrounds the Mayas, a halo echoing earth, sky

and sun, the unnoticed slow revolve of all repose

only glimpsed in the dissolve from night to day.

The tapestries are heirlooms: two borrowed from

a photographer’s closet, one unfolded in the attic,

another a dust collector hung to cover a wall crack,

and the last, depicting a tangle of horsed knights

in a tropical land on a royal leopard and lion hunt,

ancient enough to have kissed the walls of twenty houses

and become familiar with a dozen Last  Suppers.

Every house in Colemnar Viejo blessed with a nina

has a tapestry with a true or mythic history

suitable enough to be a Maya dreamscape.

The Mayas are serenaded by a brass band attired in paunchy black and white

that parades from pose to pose playing canciones praising  their beauty and style.

They wear relics carefully preserved and handed down: white petticoats

and shirts, Manila shawls of celestial yellow, blue heaven, weeping black,

vibrant Spanish carnations, and pure white, eloquently tied in the back.

Clustered around the town’s center the Mayas can see all the others

solemnly carved in silence and slow time, know that the basilica beyond

houses forever the crying Virgin and the anguished Christ surrounded

in golden murals and feel the sadness  that in minutes the frozen

can only watch them freely move, dance and play.

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