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Notre Dame: a poem
Five years after a fire ravaged our lady
Five years ago, there was a fire that ravaged and damaged much of Paris, France’s Notre Dame cathedral. I visited this landmark in 1991 when I was a Girl Scout in high school. One of the photos I took is shown above, before the damage. The remediation and recovery of the cathedral after the fire was documented by National Geographic a couple years after the fire. Here is my poem reacting to these events.
Notre Dame
You saw our lady years ago,
almost three decades before
a fire hot enough to melt her lead roof
ravaged her interior, these molten
droppings so toxic that any person
involved in the restoration and clean up
of the cathedral had to wear disposable
clothes, right down to their underwear,
and you wonder what that is doing
to the environment, if religion and
the authentic re-creation of our lady
is worth the dissolution of the
earth’s health through its toxicity,
but wasn’t she marvelous to behold
back then, sitting along the river,
her famous flying buttresses
looking like formidable birthing hips
when viewed head on, or a crouched
bent crippled hand acting as a spider,
either curled and dead or ready to
pounce, hungry; a place so ancient
it was old in 1831 when it was rebuilt
in the Gothic style, an Italian smear
for grotesque, the booted country
jealous of the elaborate…
