St. James, by Victoria Markovitz

The Throne and the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, by James Hampton (USA) 1950-1964.

St. James

Years ago you weaved between 
office chairs and desks 
in a dull  
janitor’s uniform, gathering trash, 
unseen but not  
unseeing, your mind on the divine. 

In what they discarded, you made divine.
Crafted an altar from their in between,
fearing not
the trappings of their desks,
for even in what they trashed
you saw the holy, a spirit that never dulls.

The purple paper has faded to dull
brown, but your creation is still divine,
old furniture and cardboard carved and gilded, the trash
unrecognizable, beckoning what’s between
our world and the next. Leave your desks
and come see! Fear not.
My office desk is not
revered, crossed only with dull
scratches from lunches eaten at a desk
instead of outside, among the divine.
Now I stand between
two museumgoers who only see trash,
don’t understand why you would use trash,
because it’s not
what they picture between
the pages of art books. Yet their reaction can’t dull
the divine
or dim the glow off a foil-draped desk.

But you never stopped by the desks
of your coworkers, or left just one note in the trash
to draw them to the divine.
In all your years of creation, not
once. Maybe you were afraid they’d find it dull,
or that they would turn away as you leaned between

their divine desks,
between the trash,
to whisper in their ears, our lives are not dull.

Victoria Markovitz

Victoria Markovitz studied poetry at the University of Maryland's Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House. Her work has been published in Little Patuxent Review, and she recently won the The Creative Scavenger hunt hosted by MoonLit and Ink Press Productions. She currently works as an editor in Washington, D.C.