Mythical Creatures you swallow your tails

entwined for eternity,

the never-endingness that is Iona.

 

I can no longer tell where Iona stops and I begin.

We have become one,

forever linked in our mirror images.

 

I am released into

the rocks, sea, sand, birds,

water, sea, and sky.

 

I have let go of corporeal me.

Here I am all spirit,

a light being like

a Sufi spinning into pure energy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sister Delphinia

Sister Delphinia is blue. Every day she sits on the stone bench of the Chapter Room to confess her sin, the sin of lust. All-encompassing. All-consuming. It is her only sin. It’s not that she is otherwise pure. Put simply, there is no room for any other sins. She lusts after the color blue, craves it, wants to embody its brilliance.

When she joined the order and chose Sister Delphinia as her name, Mother Superior failed at dissuading her from using that name. Alternative suggestions were met with a firm no. And Sister Delphinia being a Taurus stubbornly clung to her choice and wore Mother Superior into acquiescence.

Her love of blue did not make Sister Delphinia a purist. She loved all shades of blue. The cerulean blue of the sea, the marble blue of the sky, the steely blue-gray of the water on a cloudy day, the shimmering silvery blue of the shoreline where the sun kissed the waves, and the azure surface of the bay on a calm day. Sister Delphinia’s favorite Spanish word was azul, the word for blue.

She was a woman behind her time. Had she been born in the twentieth century her favorite book would have been Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. She hated her own dark brown eyes, which went from brown to obsidian when her emotions ran high, which was often. She would have thought she had died and gone to heaven if she could have been part of the Blue Man Crew, covered in all of that lovely blue paint.

She thought of herself as a blue blood although she came from no royal bloodline. It made her smile, smirk actually, just to think of it.

Although her love of blues was universal, there was one shade that scared her, the schizophrenic periwinkle, which couldn’t decide if it wanted to be lavender or blue. She felt periwinkle was an agent of the devil, trying to lure her to the dark side of purple.

Sister Delphinia knew that, in truth, her greatest sin was not actually lust. Her greatest sin was that she didn’t truly believe lusting after blue was a bad thing. Blue was so pure, so innocent. She imagined Mother Mary always wearing pale, pearly blue. What could symbolize more purity than that?

So she kept on confessing day after day after day. Hoping against hope that she would not go to hell where there would certainly be no blue. And for Sister Delphinia that would be Hell, indeed.

 

Rebekah Spivey for The Poplar Grove Muse