Communion
by Albert Glover
Sunday morning at U. U. Church
Grasse River Players
were in service
with a readers’ theater potpourri of bits & skits
many flavored and marvelous for the congregated
who were many and various as well.
The pews in our Church are spacious and solid,
comfortable as hardwood can be,
carved and contoured to accept the body
support it;
two rows in front of me
a couple, he on the aisle
she to his left, nothing remarkable
until a player began to sing
Joni Mitchell’s “both sides now”
and I sensed some energy light up in them,
a recognition, or a memory perhaps –
something felt.
He put his left arm around her shoulders
to hold the biceps of her left arm strongly, so
as the song went on, she slowly softened in
to his grasp until she laid her head upon his shoulder.
Sunlight shone through amber glass directly then upon her hair
which had been nondescript but now blazed
like burnished brass and radiated such beauty
that even the sound of song was swallowed up
by the light of human love made thus divine
by context and circumstance
to open my thick heart at least
this public show of miracle & wonder.
“Suddenly there is God,” and then
after that, as the music fades,
she lifts her head back onto her own shoulders;
and he, reluctant to let go,
must in time admit that
eternity had given them back to time.