A Summer Pastoral
by Michael Escoubas

Because she had suffered, she thought no one cared.
Even he whom she loved turned cold at her light touch.

Then, wiping away a tear with her palm,
she stepped into the baptismal font of dew
on bare feet; choirs of petunias arrayed in purple
sang hymns. Her pastor, the sun, robed
in threadless gold, stood strong in the pulpit,
surrounded by clouds in shades of blue and orange.
He had traveled around the globe to greet her.

Then came a moment when she recalled something
she read once in a book that lay covered with dust.
It was about new beginnings, about change,
that change might be good, and that she was not alone.

On a dreamy, long, delicious afternoon she wondered,
“Could the book be true? Might there be a place,
a moment in time, in which life is made new?
Where the sun’s light touch becomes her own?”

She remembered that patch of rhubarb planted long ago,
ripe and bulging with life … she would take a trowel,
harvest the stems and bake a succulent pie.

 

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