A Catechism
The most fundamental aspect of your religion.
Color of crushed green velveteen,
the hummingbird dipping his needle
in each scarlet zinnia, sipping
his quick nectar stitches.
What you want others to know.
Three tiny butterflies that flare and flicker
in and out of lavender thistle like small blue flames;
summer haze that sifts between hickory branches.
The most unique aspect of your religion.
Dogwood petals that blush open to spite
barbed wire tightening around the tree’s trunk.
Why you are faithful.
One grey squirrel swirling after another,
spiraling round and round,
climbing the slender redbud’s trunk.
Your rituals.
The felled hickory under mud-dark water,
wet wood rich with rotting, trunk half-sunken,
half-afloat, weather-whitened like carcass bones,
cool and smooth as water-worn stones.
The effect of these rituals on your daily life.
A lone branch of honey locust
twitching as if invisible fingers
snatched an invisible string.
Your religious symbols.
The siss of a rising breeze through the trees
and a single elm leaf that holds itself
in stillness, all the others shivering.
A guide for your future.
The copperhead swaying
through the cumulus cloud
come down to paint
white the moss green pond.
Your relationship with deities.
Brown bats, swallow-like, diving
and rising for mosquitoes
as dark replaces day’s light.
A scripture.
Breeze brushing the green lake gray
like a hand playing with velvet’s nap.
The reason for suffering.
A cardinal, there all the while
but hidden in glare,
flaring like a struck match.
A prayer.
Fog falls on the pond—
shorn wet wool piled high.
Laura Isabela Amsel lives in Madison, Mississippi, and holds an MA in Spanish from Middlebury College. She has poems in recent issues of Another Chicago Magazine, Nimrod International Journal, and Atlanta Review. Her first book, A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet, won the 2022 Brick Road Poetry Prize and was published in April 2024 by Brick Road Poetry Press.
Header photo by George, courtesy Pixabay.
