Born Again
That feeling when God shows up to your baptism,
the ecstatic terror --
He could whistle up a tornado
right there in the lake
this brilliant Sunday morning
suck all the water up,
leave you as nude as Adam
your toes curling around the mussels in the dry lakebed,
squelching them into the mud,
hands on your crotch,
grinning at the pastor,
you sorry fool.
Instead He is just electricity
ducking behind sunbeams
sparkling on the stained glass surface,
the hair rising, davening,
on the east-facing nape of your neck --
now a fresh cathedral.
Blank and bloody as a baby
on the midwife's fists:
Later you will forget all of this.
Margit Berman is a writer, psychologist, artistic director of Jackson Street Arts in St. Paul, MN, and faculty at the University of Saint Thomas and the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. Her poetry has been published in The New Verse News, If Poetry Magazine, The Quarry at Split This Rock, on the Mississippi Valley Poetry Walk, and in several anthologies, among others. She has won poetry contests including at the Poetry Free for All, Garrison Keillor’s Green Light at the End of the Dock Poetry Festival, and from the League of Minnesota Poets.
