New and Old

This is the first stage of revision of the poem below it. And it will be revised more because I'm pretty sure I've already written this exact poem before and that parallel isn't hidden enough to be acceptable. To me :)

(Titleless right now; come on, I just finished it)

Sister Sponsa stands at the lectern
praising Saint Maud
wanting us to tell her how God daily,
daily shows His majesty to our
sin-lensed teenage eyes, and I,
I want to stand up just to fall
to my knees
fall
to my hands
fall
out of favor with my peers
fall
into grace with the angels and saints,
tell them I heard Abdiel last night
in the empty apartment upstairs
the voice of a man singing
then screaming
then stamping his heels on the hardwood floor
then punching his fists against brick walls
keeping time
keeping time
to the incantation
indecipherable
incomprehensible
to the English ear
but wholly articulate to the guilty Catholic heart,
my own beating
in time
blaring
in my ears
last night. What was going on upstairs
last night? I want to ask,
to tell
that I knew nothing
but felt everything
in those beats. I want to ask if this is God and if this is faith
and if yes then what am I believing?
But in the classroom
under Sister Sponsa's dare to believe more than the patron saint
of disappointing children, Lucifer wins and the bell sounds
and I go to stand on the school steps of St Clare's with Mary Margaret
and Catherine Ann, rolling waistbands of our plaid skirts,
loosening top buttons of white uniform shirts, not saying, but saying
we don't believe, tobacco paper burning toward our sacrificial lips.






'original'

This is the New Covenant in My Blood, Shed

Standing on the steps of St Clare's after class
we roll waistbands of our plaid skirts, loosen
top buttons of white uniform shirts, saying we

don't believe, with tobacco paper burning toward
our sacrificial lips. But something in this heart
I proclaimed pagan shifts my eyes side to side,

from Mary Margaret to Catherine Anne, searching
for dissent of the after-school rebellion, hoping
they too have specters in their attics whose apologies

and pleas test their heathen faith, appeal to what
is left of the child in the adolescent, the willingness
to believe in that woman upstairs, that woman whom

the landlady says has not lived there in months, that
woman
upstairs
writhing on the mattress
pulled to the middle
of the floor
a mess of tears and sheets
on the mattress
too big for her shrinking frame
warped nightly with terrors and sweat
staining the pillowcases
I'll believe
I believe
please
just bring him back
on the mattress
the heavy silver band slips
from her thumb
rolls across the hardwood floor
from the mattress
she fights her way out
of the suffocating cocoon
of damp cotton and hears
the goodbye of smooth metal
against rusted heating vent
and is mesmerized to paralysis
from the last smile
a glint of the ring catching and throwing
the entire world from one stray beam
of light from the streetlamp
before dropping and clanging
through the apartment building
heating ducts
before she screams an unearthly sound
that leaves even Beezlebub on knees
bleeding out disbelief
if only God bent to petition
if only blood could bring her him back.