1. Sister Mary Appassionata To The Introductory Astronomy Class: Heartbeat And Mass, Every Last Breath
And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years. For every moment of light we win, each beat of the heart in each heat of the race, Old Sol sheds 4 million tons of mass. In a mere 8 billion years we’ll be nothing but chunks of glacier hurtling like manholes blown from sewers through light years of limitless dark. To live means bearing out these days like candles through drafty mansions while above us angry stars hiss like garlic cloves in smoking olive oil, souls racing down their wicks. Beyond days and nights where can we be? Each inhalation means we’ve won reprieve. Each exhalation means the only sentence long and short enough to fit the crime.
2. Sister Mary Appassionata To The Bible In Translation Class: Rite Of Purification
To turn every light back on in the house where someone of your own tribe by his own hand grew heavy enough with despair to fall through his shadow, to cleanse the hands you used in loving one who felt loving you was but an act or rite, brew over a fire on which a shadow’s never fallen the water of purification squeezed from the fat of a heifer without spot who’s known no yoke, blood of parturition, spit and sweat of an honest day’s work, tears of love old and brakish as the primal sea. Stand in sun to make your shadow do all that you do. Bathe the parts lost to selfishness, scour the stain of hurting others. You and shadow, dance the sin away; drink what’s left. Remember: like cures like. Hurt and curse can be purged only by the flood of remembering, rite of keeping alive the spirit of every dead, living for the holy wind of every right word.
