Inviolable

Morgan Driscoll

In the solemn stillness
of the grade school gym,
seraphic voices,
cherubic jazz hands,
blazers that hang low like cassocks,
sanctify us with innocence.
It is here that we worship
our last sacred thing;
these, our blessed offspring.

With phone lit faces beatified
by images of sons and daughters, we,
Attorney,
Sales Director,
Quant,
all of us who want for for substance
in our mercenary days,
are addled sanctiloquents,
dazzled with awe, at what we have made.

So profane, the happy-houred father
seated at the end of the next row.
Still, he sits as if he sees the holy choir,
mouth pendent
searching for a word he does not know:
Ineffable? Sacral? Hallowed?
While, the mother to my left,
right thinking, fit, and secular,
gapes ecstatic, like a Georgia snake handler.

It puts the lie to our genteeled skills and erudite lives
the cocktail parties,
refined ennui,
the snark and cultivated sensibility that flows
from droll materiality.
All lies, exposed
by pious rapture at quotidian measures,
marking
how our divine child grows.