It was a stranger summer than before.
The nuns had warned us from the water's edge
and in the flush of June we sheened
the back of pews with praying hands:
"God the Father, may the new moon come."
That moonless night of late July
our livid bodies lived with their own yens;
down from dormitory windows
in our dressing gowns, bare feet thick
on brick and sand, we crept towards water.
Here we found the secret of the thin-lipped nuns:
Ten thousand skeletons, scoured
and sleeping bodies on the slab of beds-
burnished white by sea winds,
floating on volcanic glass like Jesus walked.
They lit the shore, ten thousand slivers
of a shattered moon. The Old God granted
our impious prayers and in his awfulness
He blacked the sky by bringing bone yards-
no greater miracle exists.
We who own nothing but the rosary
collected curves: clavicles, ribs, the broad basin
of a mother's pelvis, meant for childbirth.
We traded ossicles for oranges, vertebrae for cigarettes,
Mallei for mkate with our tea.
At Sunday mass Adimu-who-the-nuns-call-Mary
heard lachrymals calling lachrymosely from her pockets.
She had ripped each prize from the eyes of a woman
and in the secrecy of the sacristy she bent us to the bones.
We learned again of God:
"The ash fell white.
I thought it was the Dutchman's snow-
and then it burned me. The myrinx of my left ear
burst and I died deafly on the sand,
running towards the steaming ocean water,
rafted up on gouts of felsic lava, cast away,
the human jetsam of my home upon this island,
Sebesi, subject to a God who is not your God,
who is not gentle, who does not love."
So the bone nights were born; we did not sleep. Squatted and casting from our still fleshed hands, phalanges, rites of speaking lit by noctilucent clouds- the stapes strung on cords around our necks, the others thrown as auguries.
He broke the moon and blacked the stars,
marked the sky with bands of glowing blue,
knowing no good things, light from dark,
night from day. The Father lied; we hear the gospel.
Our world has no order-only God.