I.
When I was three, I believed God
was a man in the clouds
with a white beard
and a fathomless smile
who breathed life into the mother I loved.
When I was four, I saw my mother struck down
for the first time—struck down
by loss, by absence,
by an emptiness that followed her,
shredded her, her very own poltergeist,
a phantom whose violence
mangled her soft, loving face.
The fire that filled me then
I believed was His: I believed
He wanted me to stand up
and push back
and fight
for a woman on her knees.
So, with little more than gentle words
and the two small hands I’d been given,
that’s what I did.
When I was five, I saw
that there is more than one ghost
in this world—that sometimes ghosts
come from warm bodies, hot tempers,
cold shoulders, and I saw
all the ways my world was haunted.
I saw the hollow eyes, the bowed shoulders,
and for some reason this, this, convinced me
that the world breathed with me,
that there was life outside of me;
that God hadn’t stopped His work
with my mother, and now,
neither should I.
So I stood up.
I pushed back.
I fought
for the people on their knees.
When I was seven, I found God
in a boy—not a prophet, not a saint,
but a boy with dark, floppy hair,
sparkling eyes, and a smile
fathomless as the sea.
I’d been fighting for other people my whole life.
I’d never had someone fight for me.
I grew up. My God transformed.
He wasn’t a He, or a She, or a They, or an It.
God grew into a wordless feeling in my chest,
a perfect moment, suspended in amber,
impossible to describe but in charcoal and paints:
The glint of dawn across the fog-swathed bridge.
Ma’s laugh when she burned the Christmas roast.
The way his hair fell across his eyes.
The car-horn-and-cigarette-smoke heartbeat of the city.
Soft voices in the long hours of morning.
The warmth of her arms, big enough for two.
Her eyes, gleaming with love and fever.
The last time I held her hand in mine.
His gentle smile as he led me home.
God was a moment
of beauty, of belonging—
stunning; fleeting.
They shipped him away.
I wondered
whether there was any God at all.
I wondered, if He wanted me to fight, why
He left me marooned, my last gasp
torn from my lungs, my hard-won breath
handed a gun he never wanted
and made to fight a war
he did everything in his power
to protect me from.
I wondered why,
in order to quench the flames in me,
in order to fulfill God’s mission for me,
I had to betray the first person
to show me what God really was.
I stood up.
I pushed back.
I fought
for a world on its knees.
The boy who’d shown me God
fought with me, and I knew
he didn’t believe, not really,
not anymore,
but he fought
as he always had:
for me.
And I never stopped believing.
I thanked my God every day.
I thanked that boy every day.
He went to his knees
and I went to mine.
II.
I awoke from dreamless sleep,
a nightmare sleep, just one lung
and half a heart
lurching forward
because I’d never learned how to stop.
I had my very own poltergeist—
I had an army of them, phantoms
of a life long since lost
sinking claws into my throat,
mangling my insides.
It was sickness again, my ribs rattling
like they used to, only
there was no tonic for it
this time—there was no warmth
from a mother’s arms, no God
to grow me another lung, no boy
pressing me down,
letting me rest.
I couldn’t rest.
Sleep was my first fear.
My second was him.
My last was myself.
At first, before I knew,
before I saw, I did
what I’d always done:
I stood up.
I pushed back.
I fought
for a world on its knees.
He could break them all.
He could break me.
Funny enough, he did.
The fight was over.
The heroes prevailed.
The world got up again
and I didn’t. I couldn’t.
Because it was him.
God.
My God.
Too-long hair fell
across too-bright eyes,
but he was there—
my most violent phantom;
a decimating shade, real again—
and for the first time in a long time,
I believed.
More than that,
I understood.
See, I always thought I’d been made
to stand up.
To push back.
To fight.
Stalwart and steady and true.
But the real truth, I know
as the weight of the world slides
from my shoulders, is that my mission
is much smaller
and sweeter
and braver than that.
I go, grateful, to my knees
and down, further—
I fall.
I surrender
to the only real God I ever knew,
to the only faith
and the only mission
and the only home
I ever needed:
to a moment;
to a man.
I wouldn’t be standing here now
without him.
III.
When I was three, I believed God
was a man in the clouds.
I was wrong.
He’s here on Earth,
and I’ll drown in his smile again
if it kills me.