I can no longer sit
in church on Sundays.
It presses down on me,
thick and binding as a waistband
wrung around a pregnancy
or braided hair too tightly wound.
An hour to be endured.
Then, in the airless space
beneath the layering of ritual,
to inner eyes, well hidden
by my parched-tight, enpewed frame,
the image, uncalled, came.
The enormous braindead body-of-Christ
hooked up to a breathing machine.
And then I saw,
beneath the stark white sheet,
the rising swell of newformed life,
ripened for birth,
and felt in me the unrelenting urge
to push toward the opening.
Coming then up
right out of myself
I rose
in the smack middle
of the droning sermon
and walked toward the door,
released into pure brightness
and a wind so wild
that it undid my hair.
Deb Cooper