PoetryMagazine.com Editor's Featured Poet Pamela Taylor

Pamela Taylor
USA

Pamela Taylor is a poet and science fiction writer. Her writing often finds its way to feminism, spirituality, and theology. Her poetry has been published in several anthologies including Writing the Sacred; The Echoing Green; Many Voices, One Faith, and online at The Other Voices International Poetry Project. She has won several awards for her poetry, including the Muslim Voices Poetry Award in 2006. She was also nominated to the Rhysling award in 2006.

Theology of Bones

I may not have been created from your rib
But I cleave to your side as though I were.
Your bones call to mine
And they respond, yearning, pulling,
As though they could melt through skin
And return to the place of belonging.

O perfidious bone!
My heart knows other truths.
It loves
But will not be prisoned
in a cage of rib
It will
beat
free
To like or to care,
To admire and prefer,
To adore!
It may acquiesce
But it will not yield
It skips away
From those who would hold it
Fast
Reveling in rebellions
And the glory of autonomy.

My mind recoils
From your osseous treachery
From your pliant complicity
In the betrayal
Of convictions,
Of logic and feelings
As germane,
And organic
As your calcite hunger.

But what do ribs care for philosophy?
For hard felt ideals
And notions of justice
For rights,
And the promise of equality?
What place have these in skeletal lust?
What place in the orbit of bone round bone?

My frame is rigid
It does not acknowledge heart or mind
But inclines toward you,
With its own theology
My bones ache with solitarity
Strain toward unity.
Bending themselves to you
Conforming to the camber of your body,
My whole being bows to you, curved, crooking
Two souls graven from a single spine.

Page 2