The souls line up like a million stars,
A river of billowing light and song.
Before them a passage of hours and days,
Behind them the throng
Of heaven’s voices.
Their wing tips humming with the deep thrumb
Of creation.
For behind and below and betwixt and before
Suns, moons, stars and galaxies fall
And rise,
Spinning.
Their incandescent song praising celestial choices.

The passage forged in the bowels of the earth
With fire and brimstone and hands of despair,
Coiled and contorted on a blistering potter’s wheel,
Then finally released into netherwhere.

Born into limbo,
Its cold, hot heart begins to beat;
Its diamond sides glow and pulsate with a soft, low song;
Its spirit awakens and is ready

To beat, burst, thrust
From the belly of the earth;
Through the tearing pain of the mother’s womb,
Through the brimming tears of the father’s soul,
Through space, through time, through the highest hereafter
To the brink of nothingness,
Where stars sing, angels thrumb
And light-clad souls stand at the threshold of eternity.

She glances down at her iridescence,
Diamond-clad soul with the fate of mankind clasped to her breast.
Beside her, the thick cocoon of joy and song
Is rent.

Into the bellowing breach, darkness bubbles through.

A screaming, fearing, thrashing pierces the throng,
Forcing its way through the billowing light and song,
As warders bring her, the doomèd one.

The closer she gets to her passage of pain
The fainter her glow.
Her cloth of light and song fade
As she is torn from divinity;
Light shredded from her being
on the grater of Godless servitude.

Clothed in darkness
And forced to eat the bitter stew
That no mother’s pity, nor father’s sweat could assuage.