Member Poem

in persona Christi
as if walking on the water of my sorrows

he approaches to thank me
grateful for my reply to a parish email--

after passing both slits at the same time
my wave function collapses

what’s the etiquette with priests?
hesitating between a smiley and a wink--

he fluffed a couple of lines in mass

the word for the feeling you’ve known someone forever?
the word for there being no emotional barrier?

and lead us not into temptation

house-churched a decade and a half--but
when did we ever pray the Lord’s Prayer together?
when did we break bread that wasn’t a supermarket loaf
or drink any old bottle of red
  calling it holy?

now to adore the consecrated Host
as The Observer observes  read captures/detects

Divine Consciousness and the particle on its way to reality
everywhere simultaneously

uncertainty and probability
strong and weak, peaks and troughs
  amplification I understand

His eyes go through the whole earth
I asked for a husband (a second chance)
a man with courage, certain characteristics--

my plea diffracted, He gave me a fictional rhinoceros
the sweetest pachyderm you could find--love at first charge

this display of purity  is not merely physical

Father, I’m
in all possible locations and paths

my life’s a causal mess, variations
though my past is erased / cancelled out
  --which way?

single  I have only myself to interact with

I sense something wonderful/weird
a constructive interference
a set of pure probabilities
a fundamental connection

celibacy, not conceived as an experiment
creates no duality, encounters no obstacle, no walls

but a delayed choice
if one could   retroactively choose
  while not interfering with building blocks and coherence

the two waves act as if a completely new source

there exist entangled pairs of photons
that look out for each other, as physics breaks down--

absorbed by a crystal  affecting  the resulting pattern

and our matter too  is by nature  energy over light
 

(The 2022 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Contest, Finalist)