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Margaret D. Smith
If you give yourself
to Yahweh like a newborn
at sundown,
he will say
you didn't need to go
to all the trouble,
but secretly
like your father
he loves presents.
So present yourself--
unwrapped,
open-handed,
spent from the exertion
of stripping away
to skin and bones,
nothing
to say for yourself
except a wail of tears--
a living,
breathing mystic sacrifice
in your birthday suit.
Give him what he
only wished for,
a child.
Give him nothing
more, just the way
you were born.
Margaret D. Smith is a writer, artist and musician who has published two books of nonfiction and four books of poems, including A Holy Struggle: Unspoken Thoughts of Hopkins (Shaw, 1992), with photographs by Luci Shaw and foreword by Walter Wangerin, and Barn Swallow (Brass Weight Press, 2006). Her poems have been published in more than 50 publications, including Paris Review, Christianity and Literature, The Handmaiden and The Christian Century. Margaret's latest venture is creating one prose poem (or is it a short-short-short story?) per day for a year. Lately, God has been telling her one thing over and over: "Time is short; tell the truth." No place seems better to carry out that kind of truth-telling than in a poem.
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