Downtown in Salisbury, on Innes St.,
towered on the median between both lanes,
stands a massive copper statue of an angel
embracing a soldier. Mounted on cinnamon granite,
they glimmer in the sunlight. Across the street,
a Presbyterian church with an identical stone base;
the plaque of blurbs above the door caramelizes.

It is not the idea of a dedication to soldiers
that makes my mind shuffle in this five o’clock traffic,
but the black woman who crosses the tarred street
behind those wings, unfurled forever, swathing
the soldier’s penny-polished face, cause and duty,
as if to divert every driver’s attention, invert time
at the red light, make us stare at the angel’s
overt gawkiness, the lofty soldier’s guilty beauty,
and try with civility, to read the tiny inscription.


© 2004 by Jenni Russell