Loss of Faith by Morag Burn

I cried when I lost my faith.

Though it had been seeping through 

the pores of my skin.

“It runneth over.”

Screaming down my spine

the voltage bolt

leathered my soles.

It hollowed my belly

and shattered my stance.

So with nothing to hold- up:

I lay down and wept 

for the eagles eye,

the star in the night sky

the pigs that fly.

They all thrashed in my tears.

I clawed to peel off my skin

to get rid of the old hide

where their marks had ran.

I cried when I lost my faith, though it had been seeping through the pores of my skin. It was a process as natural as breathing, the shedding of skin - but once it stopped a shock to the system. You wouldn't have even seen it, smelt it been able to feel it. Someone had flicked a switch and turned that fragile page, and when the lights came back on and you carried on reading those pretty watercolour illustrations had gone and harsh Gothic gargoyles leered in thick potent oil paint. A harsh contrast that made them swell out of the fibres of the page, the oily mixture leaked onto my fingers and smeared over the pristine edges which were warping under the pressure.  

A pop up book - it required a new level of educational interaction. It was caste into turmoil, it did not fit into other lessons, you can only be satisfied with contradictory moral stories for so long- you move on to the big books. You move in to your own mind. I knew what the narrator was trying to tell me but it did not sit well on my tongue it puckered my taste buds and clagged my throat. Literary asthma. My mother wrote a note saying I was to be excused, she would not have me burning for all of hell and its fury - “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” she would say. 

by Morag Burn

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