MIRA

SOMEDAYS I WAKE UP INFINITE

How am I?

Which version would you like
the woman on her knees in the kitchen at midnight
the mystic watching ghosts in the hallway of memory
the widow holding sunlight like a wound

the teacher
the child
the one who disappeared in prayer and came back with so much less to say.

How to tell you who I am?

transforming
ascending
burning

and somedays
I could say
“I am healing.”

Everyone loves that one

But the truth is stranger

Some mornings I wake up infinite
and by evening
you’d find me crying over one hateful word I will never forget

Some nights I feel God breathing inside everything:

the snow storm in May
these old hands and their aches
tenderly wondering if
someone could truly love me

And other nights
I am a feral animal of grief
trying to survive another hour in a body that remembers how love suffocated alone without me

So what is God then?

Do not ask me with language so small

God is not a definition
not an old man with a kingdom
not a self-help slogan
wearing white linens

God is what remains
when every identity ends

God is the silence after devastation
the strange mercy that keeps opening
your chest
after you begged
to die

God is the unbearable intimacy of being alive

And still
I know nothing

Not really

Because the moment I speak
the truth shrinks to fit
and my mouth is too dry to explain

So perhaps enlightenment is not becoming certain

Perhaps it is finally becoming honest

Honest enough to say
I have touched something divine
and still fall into rage in traffic forgetting who I am

Honest enough to laugh
when people ask for answers
as though God could be folded neatly into syllables

No

I started laughing

Impolitely
unintelligibly
unrestrained
never grasping onto
how I think God should be

The kind of laughing
that cracks the ribs open
the kind that spills out when you realize you spent your whole life searching
for the door
while standing inside the house

I started laughing
because the mystery was never hiding

Only dancing
wearing our faces
grinning so wildly until
there are no more words

~MIRA