Soul Reckoning
       

I'm skimming through a book called Spook:
Science Tackles the Afterlife.
It turns out gravity

doesn't hold for souls; souls drift, like loons
between dives, into eternity, along
with NASA's detritus—urine bags,

thousands of thin copper wires, a chunk of Apollo 12.
Knowing this, I leave behind five decade's worth
of fear that I'll die and no longer be,

that consciousness must be contained in a body.
To get here, I had to say goodbye to guilt,
to regret I didn't attend the funeral

of my mother's body, to wishing I could've helped
my cousins gather daisies from a field
down the road from where

they lowered her casket into a hole, to chime or chip in
about the words to engrave on her marking stone;
on all of this I punted, from all of this

I excused myself on account of a plane ride, the scepter
of unmasked sobbing, sweating,
singing, cookies and punch.

To get here, I had to take the rutted road where they put
my mother's body, a road rutted with limestone creatures
laid down 500 million years ago

in a shallow sea. My travel speed is two inches per year,
same as the moon from Earth. A little less bound
by gravity. A little more free.

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Copyright © 2021 Martha Silano All rights reserved
from Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission