Rachael Mead # 22, The sacred and the profane

The sacred and the profane

So it was like this - a lapsed pagan finds herself

in a company of Christians, their faith held generously

in the air of their pockets and bursts of smiling breath.

We had gathered to write in a convent on the bay,

the ocean a great mouthful of cold beyond the fence.

I slept fitfully under Jesus, his face tilted down as if to ask “you?”

It was the winter solstice, I hadn’t planned it that way.

I walked into the sunrise of the shortest day, the sacred

and the profane awkwardly cohabiting a pair of op-shop jeans.

At dusk, again at the edge of the waves’ nomadic range

I was bladderwrack, no longer at home in water or air,

rubbing weary eyes over the perigee moon’s ripe belly.

But on the third day I woke to find the stone rolled back,

the fence no longer a separation between me and the earth,

everything shifting pleasurably in the swill of winter sun.

This time on the beach, the sand giving beneath my feet,

I wove my own prints into the lace of foot, paw and claw,

the world granting us all the same tiny concession of notice.