Religare

a surprise video-call, and off we go again, cancelling

thousands of kilometers.

pixelated through the distance, dusk is beginning to fall

across the other continent,

and in the gathering darkness, he is just a small boy

in front of a massive church.

saints in gilded icons and towering marble columns

seem hushed and irrelevant

behind his boyish smallness as he leans over flickering flames

intently, his coat oversized,

the blue sneakers on his 7-year-old feet seeming to belong

to an older boy.

these are for the living, he murmurs as he lights the frail

candles stuck into the sandbox,

and these ones for the dead, he says, as if he knew

what it's all about.

i wonder if he senses, somehow, that he's closer than ever

to my mother - his grandmother -

who never had a chance to meet him,

as he officiates, priest-like, among the candles, lighting the new ones

with the flames of the old ones

keeping the ancient line alive between the dawns and the twilights,

between the ends and the beginnings,

between the lost and the found, his small hands ceremoniously

gliding through the air,

like a conductor decisively, gracefully making music,

to link the sky and the ground,

and everyone who's ever lived,

anywhere,

and all the time.