When they ask to see your gods your book of prayers show them lines drawn delicately with veins on the underside of a bird's wing tell them you believe in giant sycamores mottled and stark against a winter sky and in nights so frozen stars crack open spilling streams of molten ice to earth and tell them how you drink a holy wine of honeysuckle on a warm spring day and of the softness of your mother who never taught you death was life's reward but who believed in the earth and the sun and a million, million light years of being ©  1986 J.L.Stanley

Catechism for a Witch's Child