First Religion

Women enough years older than me were always God

A God you can grow into and a God you can desire

One of the first was Julia, fifteen years old and stroking the hair of a French boy

Teaching me what naughty words mean

Reading are you there (Julia) it’s me Margaret

Out loud before bed and driving the speedboat 

Me, nine years old, a patron of the church of her face and confidence

Felt God (change, Julia, the connectedness of all beings to each other and the land)

For the first time at a mother-daughters-run summer camp in the Wisconsin woods

The job of us fresh worshippers was just to wake, pack a sack

Lunch (requirements: two sandwiches, two fruits, two hostess treats, bag of chips)

Eat breakfast (pancakes?)

Pile in the van and swing singing all the way to the sand beach with the swimming dock

Stay and play and sun and eat and let time happen (linger a little longer)

Pick ticks off each other

Fish for sunnies and take turns driving the golf cart down the curving path hoping

Mom was wrong about danger and risk

Spaghetti dinner before sardine into the bunk house and mosquito itch ourselves to hot sleep 

I watched her and then the two weeks ended

And I wore my fairy costume home and then out to dinner with my parents who seemed

Relieved to have me back and shocked by what the sun had done to my skin

I buzzed and twirled, crispy and awake alive to the grief of the ending

And the difference now that life wasn’t girls and women by the lake

I left her church and that holy land and fashioned a vision

Of myself after her - create myself in her likeness, like maybe I could be the god

That leads the next girls to the sacred ceremony of summertime