Regarding the God of Merciful Reversals

Sitting wide-eyed at water’s edge,

haunted by threatening unknowns,

hooked by the reflection of moonlit trees,

I listened to history written within their roots,

initially shrinking and then enlarging.

At first I became a bell reverberating with memories,

a moment more, a camera’s eye, probing the night-altered skies,

next, a mouse-nosed princess endowed with second sight,

myself, a child, lifting mother’s mirror from the wall,

carrying it like a tray, stork-stepping through the house,

eyes fixed on the world inverted, translated,

in the reflecting face of the flashing mirror steadied between my hands.

I walked across ceilings, through door posts, over light fixtures,

and door jambs, and across the wooden deck.

I passed unscathed through the lemon tree's sharp thorns,  

arriving magically exalted

in the high nest of the walnut tree.

Captured in a hoist of memory,

I swam through time to France,

back to Sacre Coure’s Easter choir performance,

illuminated by candles, a thousand prayers strong.

There, schooled in a rhapsody of rescue ---

Christ the Lord is Risen today, Al__le__lu___ia!

I escaped the crushing dirge of dread.