The Passing of Sacred Geometry – a poem by Dia Calhoun

The Passing of Sacred Geometry          		

My Sunday School teacher drags 
a straight black line across the whiteboard. 
Whips out four more, up, down, across—

A star! I gasp with the other kids.

Five points and five lines, she says,
make the perfect star. Try.

With my fat, gold crayon I scrawl
a curly line. Lavish
another over it and another—
	five lines, 
		eight lines, 
		     nine	
		          too many to count 
	 my hand flourishes
			            a wild
	 	       	       sea-anemone star.

Wrong, the teacher says. Your star
is uncontained. How will you color it in?
She jabs her diagram. Pay attention
to the star God tells you to follow.

	Tonight, I lie on August grass 
in Gregorian cricket-chant, surround-sound. 
Dad called this star-bathing
in the long-ago-here-and-now. 
	Too many to count
		tremor on a black sky drum.
		     Radiance
	     from light-years 
	away pulses
		my eyes, throat, belly, lips—
		     incandesces 		
		 then rushes out 	
	to far-off eyes
		in other worlds
		      through the tips of my curly, white hair.

Dia Calhoun is the author of seven young adult novels, including two verse novels, After the River the Sun and Eva of the Farm(Atheneum, 2013, 2012). She has won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award; published poems and essays in The Writer’s Chronicle;EcoTheo Review; The Nashville Review; MORIA Literary Magazine; Grist Journal; And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow: An International Poetry Anthology for Ukraine, and others. She co-founded readergirlz, recipient of The National Book Foundation Innovations in Reading Prize, and taught Creative Writing at Seattle University and Stony Brook University. More at diacalhoun.com.