It won’t be a sun dance for me
I won’t have my chest pierced with sinews
Or dance myself into revelations at the edge of coma
But I will deliver myself
To be cut open
My sacrificial heart will be lifted into the cold light
Of an operating room
The table will just be a table not an altar
There won’t be a biblical patriarch in attendance
Quoting hallucinatory admonitions
I do not embody the guilt of my ancestors
Yet I wonder how blood sacrifice came to be exalted
Priestly slaughter of innocents to satiate unknowable gods
I’m certain that the creatures slit open
In some bizarre ritual transference of guilty projections
Of shame
Of fear
Of hatred
Did not feel ennobled by the experience
Just hard done by
Like royal attendants walled up in the tombs of kings
Or victims of Aztec flower wars
Climbing to the top of some pyramid
To watch the sun glinting off an obsidian blade poised high
Before the downward thrust
It must take a lot of misplaced religious fervor
To overcome the realization that death is present
And soon you won’t be
More to the point, willingly
I wonder at the intensity of self-sacrifice
Allowing a suspension of flight or fight response to imminent threat
Choosing acquiescence to commands
Hoping that unbelievable assurances hide a shimmer of truth
Not a black hole of nothingness
Trusting in mysteries
David Trudel © 2013
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