He knew all the protestants, I the Catholics,<\/p>\n
those I’d seen at mass and the Pancake Breakfasts,<\/p>\n
the believer who asked me to join the Knights,<\/p>\n
the gentle man with a smoker’s cough that killed him,<\/p>\n
The woman, old and Irish, whose whispered critiques<\/p>\n
of father’s homily rang in the narthex.<\/p>\n
For me, the crypted protestants, mostly Presbyterians,<\/p>\n
were just obituary headlines.<\/p>\n
You’d think we were in Northern Ireland. My protestant<\/p>\n
friend shared stories of those not Catholic who he<\/p>\n
remembered as neighbors, co-workers, or victims.<\/p>\n
We both wondered at a weathered cigarette<\/p>\n
jammed into the gap between niche door and frame<\/p>\n
in lieu of flowers, checked for a pharos’ name,<\/p>\n
then wandered away to our respective niches<\/p>\n
each smug that his crypt will offer the better view.<\/p>\n
— Dan Branch <\/em><\/p>\n •<\/em> The Capital City Weekly, which runs in the Juneau Empire’s Thursday editions, accepts submissions of poetry, fiction and nonfiction for Writers’ Weir. To submit a piece for consideration, email us at editor@juneauempire.com.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A poem by Dan Branch. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":69026,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":11,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,4],"tags":[73],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-69025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home2","category-news","tag-ccw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69025\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69025"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=69025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}