Seven Times at St. Ann’s & The Holy Trinity Church, July 31, 2024

ft. Lianne La Havas

photo by Delia Taylor

Seven Times at St. Ann’s & The Holy Trinity Church, July 31, 2024
	ft. Lianne La Havas

From the chancel comes a humming
from the shy chanteuse and a slide of slender 
fingers across the frets of a handsome, 1960s 
black Harmony Alden H45 Stratotone 
(a white Juno, upright, attends beside her).

Cathedrals always seem to frame us in time,
their architectural aspiration toward eternity.
The edifice itself, Holy Trinity, and its stained 
glass by the Bolton Brothers dating back to
the late 1840s. And her music, with me 

for the better part of 12 years, through
heartache and happiness, movement and inertia,
peopled ecstasies and intimate isolation, through
nights and days of crying and praying, her voice
has been a soft place in the uncertainty.

Some hum along, most are holding their breath as 
her sound builds and, with it, anticipation among 
the sweaty congregants waving complimentary fans 
that, from the gods, makes us look like a school 
of shimmering fish or grass caught in a crosswind.

Shoulder to shoulder in pews older than most
in attendance, each a devotee of the saintly
demure from her pulpit—who’s been so careful
not to cuss in the house of G-d, believer that 
she is in the divinity at the heart of every person. 

But now, approaching the end of the night, 
she’s warmed with the passion that is her magic, 
the censer swung back to full-throated torch,
its perfume commingled with the sultry scent
of all us, strung along the measured intimacy

of her vocal arpeggiations, co-writing a love letter
with each captive ear. Our eyes meet briefly.
I hear her again walking through the streets of Paris 
with an acoustic guitar while I read Audre Lorde 
for the first time—how I learned to love myself. 

How I learned, am learning, to love you whole.