"The Angel with the Broken Wing" - Gioia

"I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,
The one large statue in this quiet room.
The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut
Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.
The docents praise my elegant design
Above the chatter of the gallery.
Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—
The perfect emblem of futility.
Mendoza carved me for a country church.
(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)
I stood beside a gilded altar where
The hopeless offered God their misery.
I heard their women whispering at my feet—
Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.
Their candles stretched my shadows up the wall,
And I became the hunger that they fed.
I broke my left wing in the Revolution
(Even a saint can savor irony)
When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.
They hit me once—almost apologetically.
For even the godless feel something in a church,
A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?
A trembling unaccounted by their laws,
An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.
There are so many things I must tell God!
The howling of the damned can’t reach so high.
But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,
A crippled saint against a painted sky."

• This poem is inspired by the Bible story of two statues that bowed before the Ark of the Covenant. The narrator, which is the Angel, is telling of how it feels when humans come before the chapel to see him and praise God.The piece seems to have a negative connotation to it since the author used words such as “dying”, “damned”, and “crippled. The author’s tone is informative since he simply tells readers of facts about him. For instance, he explicates how he broke his “left wing in the Revolution… When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel. He also tells us how he was created by “Mendoza… for a country church.”(stanza 3). The Poem shifts from talking about background information of the Angel and the Chapel in which he resides to the sudden need to tell his knowledge about past and present events to God.(last stanza). The theme of the poem is that people, even those who have no faith, feel obligated to show some type of respect in the presence of an Angel or to God.