A Prayer for Sarah

On Sundays, Sarah, you pack up your suitcase
with stacks of thick books. You grasp
the handle, hold it at your side before the mirror,
wearing a bonnet and a tough pair of boots.
You say you love to feel the weight of leaving.
But your books are only bricks, and your feet
are fixed and flattened like floorboard slats.
Sarah, your brass clock rings in the morning,
but you awoke before the golden dawn,
lying tangled in your sheets, staring at the cat in the corner.
Sarah, a world of war is begging outside your skin.
You have a thousand stories stirring inside your bones,
lay them out like fossils to tell your history in silence.
Sarah, you are a candle concealed beneath a bushel, burning.
Ancient infant, milk mother, your eyes are two springs
swelling secretly from the center of the earth, converging in a roaring face.