I signed the contract with the card company today. 38 images, all copyrighted and in card format. This image will come out with others of the same ilk (see medieval girl.) The company asked me to tone down the background into more of a garnet color, because they felt it would look richer.
All this was A LOT OF WORK. I learned far more about PhotoShop than I ever really cared to learn, but I guess I am a Better Person for learning it. (Frankly, I'm tired of building my character.) My mother used to tell me to "offer it up". Catholic, of course.
Speaking of Catholic, the title comes from the Litany to Mary at the end of the mass.
I always loved the titles the priest would call out.... "Rose of Sharon", "Tower of Gold", "House of Ivory", and the congregation would murmur, "Queen of Heaven,Rejoice, Allelulia" while incense billowed around the priest and the altar boys and the light streamed through the stained glass window above the altar.
I am not a practicing Catholic now, but a few years ago I restored the painted marble pillars and the baptismal font of the pretty little Gothic altar in my former church. It was very peaceful and familiar, painting a faux marble finish on the plaster pillars and listening to Mozart. The priest lent me his tapes, and I played my favorite, the Requiem, again and again.
I wrote a poem about the Virgin after the project....about the difference between our plain statue of Mary and the glamour of the Spanish/Filipino Marys kept by the old families in Manila and brought out once a year for processions.
I hardly recognized Filipino Catholocism as being Catholic....it was so mystical and contained more than a few aspects of the old Malay culture. Same religion? I don't think so.
Tonight Manila frees
God’s mothers
from glass boxes
in the living rooms
of old mestizo families.
At twilight the Madonnas lurch
from somber gates,
their altars hoisted
on the gleaming backs
of praying men.
Ave, Maria de Santa Rosa, the Virgin of Sampoloc.
Ave, Queen of Sorrows from Binondo.
You and your sisters show pale faces
like the tilted eyes of God,
ivory ovals in a radiance
of crinkled hair and diadems.
My childhood gods were plain.
The church placed prim
among the ordered neighborhoods,
where Mary was the patron saint
of varnished pews.
Blandly, she and Jesus smiled
on farmers and their women;
the mothers with their babies
crying in the back.
I’d fidget in my seat, and dream
of boys and high adventure
while glancing idly
at the blank
of Mary’s face,
her plastic flowers,
lacy curtains at her feet.
Where you, Madres, your Spanish brilliance spikes
a retinue of comets in the dark.
Your generators surge, electric candles
urge light across moire, along your goitered neck,
and snag on jeweled ears, the lace at breasts and cuff.
Your light slaps facets on sweating walls,
spins glamour out of filthy ground
and clothes the beggars squatting by canals.
Tonight you scatter glitter in the streets
where day shows only garbage,
circling dogs,
and slinking rats.
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