a woman such as I

I am a shipwrecked world,

I die, I rise again,

a woman such as I.

I am an abandoned playground for misfits,

a castle for saints and martyrs stuck half-way on the stairway to heaven,

I believe in inscrutable things,

the shape of air,

the corporeal nature of dreams,

I believe in things with no names,

in life cascading into and through the years,

holy and terrible,

and the whole of us dreamed up by the earth

and sequestered on the inside,

existing in the imagination of the world,

and I am standing in the ploughed field,

my toes fucking the wet soil,

and God is here, laughing,

in this lucid morning, in this broken world.

Paulette C Turcotte 2023