Susan B.
“Shadows”
Response
Dialogue in a Convent Garden
By Tyson West
Inspiration piece
Sister Barbie: Mother Superior,
Forsake did I the worldly pleasures of woman
Shopping, cleaning up baby urine, puppy poop and the vomit of male egos
For the promise of perfection here.
Speak now I like Yoda
While I seek God’s presence
I smell no purity in flowers dying on the altar
Nor in Mass offered by the whizen Franciscan father
From the shriveling church two blocks away
Words spoken in unerring symmetry distorted in time
And in wrinkled brown brain cells.
His prostate cancer grows
With his rigid rules still unlost even
As his memory shrinks.
How can woman seek union with a god
Made in the image of a male?
Mother Superior: Sister Barbie,
I concede your feelings
But emotion spun and woven is cut with the shears of dogma
I concede Father Percival’s horrid breath and condescending tone
But cloistered we keep out distractions
To crochet a perfect union with our living God
Empty out the container, my child, and God will fill it up
With perfect order.
Sister Barbie: Mother Superior,
Wrong could our assumptions be?
Leave a patch of broken soil
Unsown in our precise and cloistered garden
Strange grasses
Wild mallows, knapweed, thorns and clinging seeds appear
Male seed distorting
This perfect garden groomed so by our virginal hands
Then consider God’s mittens of mulberry leaves
Where the plant randomed of our creator puts forth leaves in three different shapes on one tree.
Only a female force could nurture such perfect inconsistency.
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