(Laura Allen/Unsplash)

You enter through the door of roses

and trefoil, held in your mother’s hands

that seem as holy as the Madonna’s

hands; the alcove Madonna who never sighs

in the hairline cracks of her imperfect wood, watching

you even as the forced grotesque limestone eye

of the gargoyle watches you; and the priest

who has known the saved and the drowned

between front and fist, grasps the span

and lunge and cry of you—

yet even as you are newly born you are dying,

and the gatekeeper, gravedigger, and mourner

will choreograph your end in this same place—

can you see, outside the church window,

the small corner of opened earth,

where land mixes with violets and old bones? 

Valerie Wohlfeld’s most recent book of poetry is Woman with Wing Removed (Truman State University Press). Her first collection, Thinking the World Visible, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Her poems have been nominated six times for a Pushcart Prize.

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Published in the April 2023 issue: View Contents
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