Tania van Schalkwyk’s Hyphen

   
    
Our Father
Tania van Schalkwyk
  
When you plunge your arms into the heavens unseen,
red-robed and lean, veins straining
to reach your god with this wafer –
all the women gathered want to fall on their knees
and pleasure you.
  
We clamber to receive Christ’s body from your beautiful hands,
naked and trembling, fingers touching
our lips, we kneel –
all us women tilt our heads back and offer
our belief to you.
  
We confess our sins to your body, hidden in darkness,
attention hovering between your imagined form
and the very real smell of you –
all us women who thirst for your blood, your gaze, forgiveness,
but mostly for the sacred in you.
  
We ask you to marry us,
to another man, another body, another life
and you oblige our wish, bless our union –
all us women get married, have babies, baptise our children
for the love of god in you.
  
We invite you to dinner at our family tables,
drink in your tales of redemption and duty
as you sip our wine, nibble our food, taste our hunger –
all us women watch you eat – and later
dream of being eaten by you.
  
  
 
Previously published in New Contrast
and included in Hyphen (The UCT Writers Series, 2009).
  
Read about Tania and Hyphen here.
   
For queries regarding Hyphen, please email:
info@electricbookworks.com.
   
Hyphen will be available on Amazon from mid-August 2009.

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