Getting Married in the Shadow of Iztaccihuatl

She dreamed that shooting stars 
would stream the palaba roofs
on the night of her honeymoon,
that  Iztaccihuatl would spark 
embers approving of her love,
glistening her wedding dress in 
ashes and a dozen golden sols. 

The next day she would drape 
the vestido  on the line, it’s wetness 
letting the entire Pueblo know that
there was spotting, consummation, 
the start of marriage and true love.

At night, it was still drying, now almost 
a fluttering black and white shadow,
now almost a Luna Moth soaring high 
enough to seem almost a ghost in the 
nocturnal light of Garabato. 
By morning every curtain of her casa
was  casted in the shape of her love.

She glanced in the mirror on her dressing stand
anticipating to see the reflection of her love
but only saw brown moths dancing, dancing
just outside the windows, roses dying in a red vase
and the whispered voices of her vecinos, 
all her neighbors, chanting, rising, rising 
La Locura, La Locura, the madness, the madness
until she fainted.   Two days later she was buried,
her coffin draped with the harlequin cloth she 
was wearing the day the Luna Moth visited her.



Note:

Garabato translates to scribble.

Iztaccihuatl("white woman" in Nahuatl, sometimes called the Mujer Dormida "sleeping woman" in Spanish) is an actual Mexican volcano.  

One Hundred Years of Solitude by the late Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my favorite novels.  I love its magical realism and sad pathos bordering on myth.  To read it is to fully live in that realm between imagination and dreams.  I always wanted to write a poetic vignette that would fit perfectly within its over 400 plus pages.  This is my imagined four stanza contribution using the dark, beautiful and haunting photos of everyday adornments by Jessica Gonzalez for poetic inspiration.
https://edgeofhumanity.com/2022/03/12/artist-expose-photography-2/