May Procession – a poem by Mary Beth Hines

May Procession
 
We sail on lace
feathered arms
into the glare of May
sunlight, shattering 
the air with a chorus
of our nuns’ saintly,
sweeping names.
They brush us into line.
 
We descend the grand 
slope of cathedral stairs
sparkling with the ice
melt of a nearly
forgotten winter, and fly
to the hill over the river 
where we hover
above the blare
of the sin-filled world.
 
A May Procession, all
blossom and yellow-
beaked, orange-tinged, pure
black and white, burning
hawthorn, and all of us
bloom and sway 
and tip toward a fall 
from the slick 
bank into the whirling
water below.

Mary Beth Hines writes from her home in Massachusetts following a career as a project manager. Her work appears in journals such as Crab Orchard Review, Orchards Poetry Journal, The Blue Nib, The Lake, Snakeskin, and The Road Not Taken among many others. She is working on her first poetry collection.