For Rachel, Just before Speech
We are the body moving toward demise;
we are the soul, remnant of another life.
And always, rain tapping on a zinc roof
is the sound of fingers thrumming flesh.
Always, I return
to the things of this world, tethered.
You, who have come to me
from something, somewhere, I cannot name;
you who have a voice that does not speak
any language I know, yet unfurls bright wings,
alighting in each corner of this house;
you who are mine and not mine,
tell me the answers
while there is time.
—Shara McCallum
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previously published in Image: a Journal of the Arts & Religion
& then reprinted in Evensong: Contemporary Poems on Spirituality