We went to church
and got long strips of palm,
dry, yellowish, hard
to imagine greening on a tree.
At home we’d make
two brief lengthwise slits
in a longer piece and weave
a shorter through it: a cross.
This palm cross always made us glad
strange gladness considering
the tortured death it symbolized,
but who were we to question
long tradition of celebration,
so the palm cross stayed up,
pinned to the wall or stuck
into a mirror frame, a cross
to bless our house this year,
a small holy thing, maybe
six or seven inches tall.

2.
We did all this just because
we were Catholics, or Irish,
all the people in the neighborhood—
from Sicily, Naples, Calabria—
did it too.
                     Who knows
why we do what we do.
And where did crosses come from
anyhow? Dry scholars claim
we wear them round our necks because
Viking ancestors worshipped Thor
and wore his double-headed hammer
tiny round their necks.
Is that the hammer that once
nailed Christ to His cross?
It hurts me to think of what we do
to those who love us,
love us enough to come talk to us.

4.
My fingertips still can feel
the dry tough smooth
of the little palm cross,
months later when we took it down,
stuck it in a prayer book.
bookmark, eternal souvenir
of what we don’t understand,
why we do what we do,
why we are who we are.

28 March 2021