1579: Angel Saint | Lilah Hegnauer
"Angel Saint"
Lilah Hegnauer
for Ssenono Vicent (9/1984 - 9/2003)
If I could choose, if it was possible, if I was worthy, if babies homes weren’t crowded
if aunts and grandparents weren’t overburdened and I could take it all back
to the point where no man had sinned, I would rather be an angel than a saint.
I would rather float close to God and close to men than be canonized by men.
I’m dying and I see a light, I’m dying and I see my creator, I’m dying
and the heat which fills my veins finally calls my lifelong bluffing
and I leave. Life’s been so long in coming and so quick in going - somewhere between
watching my parents turn hollow and smelling the rainy season come on again
and again life must have happened because now it’s stopping and I can’t find
the part where life happened at all. Once, madam was explaining a sonnet and the turns
it can take at the end and the tensions its form carries and I thought my life is less sonnet
and more rhymed couplet - beginning, it is nearly done and ending, it is still being propelled.
My lantern is fading, my coal is cooling. I want to leave this world and find another,
not stay remembered here where only Ugandans would notice me looking out
from prayer cards. They’ll pray and I’ll have to be the mendicant for their
eyelid lesions and pointed ribs, their mouth sores, night sweats, and patching hair;
so let me be an angel, let me watch again from above. I’ll stop begging and
start living; please give it up, please give me up, please - I want to go and meet them -
the saints I prayed to, the angels who watched over me, the God who made me
in his image. I want to see if he has shrunken muscles, too and know if his mouth
grows dry in the night so he wakes swollen and cracking. I want this heat, this choice.
Let's start with this. There was girl once, a lovely girl, and we were young and I still didn't understand the world and she understood a little more than me. We were best friends though she was a few years older than me and at that age, that kind of thing makes a difference. But we wrote notes back and forth, letters every day. I'd sit in chemistry class or English and scribble away instead of paying attention to the teacher and then run to the bulletin board after school to post my note to her. And she'd write me back and post it on the student message board for my year and we did this for a year or two until I left the school. I still have that notebook of notes, of best friend love letters, pages of notebook paper that gave me hope and connection. And what she wrote was beautiful and mundane and everything that I needed and everything I wanted. She is the one that introduced me to poetry, though at the time I told her it was stupid and didn't understand it. She'd handwrite verses for me, most of the ones that I posted here in the earlier days, and that was such a gift. Classics too, poems that I would never have read if she had not written them in painstakingly clear print and told me why they mattered, why it mattered that there was literature, why it mattered that these words had endured. The honesty and the poetry and the constant reminder that life was beautiful and there was beauty and here are the words, read the words and know that there is more to this life than your mind going crazy and that this will pass. These words were here before you and will be here after you and they are beautiful. And everything she said was true: there was more, it did pass, the words lasted, and they were beautiful.
More than once I've walked/under the sun and beneath the luminous moon/not knowing what or whom to thank.
Lilah Hegnauer
for Ssenono Vicent (9/1984 - 9/2003)
If I could choose, if it was possible, if I was worthy, if babies homes weren’t crowded
if aunts and grandparents weren’t overburdened and I could take it all back
to the point where no man had sinned, I would rather be an angel than a saint.
I would rather float close to God and close to men than be canonized by men.
I’m dying and I see a light, I’m dying and I see my creator, I’m dying
and the heat which fills my veins finally calls my lifelong bluffing
and I leave. Life’s been so long in coming and so quick in going - somewhere between
watching my parents turn hollow and smelling the rainy season come on again
and again life must have happened because now it’s stopping and I can’t find
the part where life happened at all. Once, madam was explaining a sonnet and the turns
it can take at the end and the tensions its form carries and I thought my life is less sonnet
and more rhymed couplet - beginning, it is nearly done and ending, it is still being propelled.
My lantern is fading, my coal is cooling. I want to leave this world and find another,
not stay remembered here where only Ugandans would notice me looking out
from prayer cards. They’ll pray and I’ll have to be the mendicant for their
eyelid lesions and pointed ribs, their mouth sores, night sweats, and patching hair;
so let me be an angel, let me watch again from above. I’ll stop begging and
start living; please give it up, please give me up, please - I want to go and meet them -
the saints I prayed to, the angels who watched over me, the God who made me
in his image. I want to see if he has shrunken muscles, too and know if his mouth
grows dry in the night so he wakes swollen and cracking. I want this heat, this choice.
Let's start with this. There was girl once, a lovely girl, and we were young and I still didn't understand the world and she understood a little more than me. We were best friends though she was a few years older than me and at that age, that kind of thing makes a difference. But we wrote notes back and forth, letters every day. I'd sit in chemistry class or English and scribble away instead of paying attention to the teacher and then run to the bulletin board after school to post my note to her. And she'd write me back and post it on the student message board for my year and we did this for a year or two until I left the school. I still have that notebook of notes, of best friend love letters, pages of notebook paper that gave me hope and connection. And what she wrote was beautiful and mundane and everything that I needed and everything I wanted. She is the one that introduced me to poetry, though at the time I told her it was stupid and didn't understand it. She'd handwrite verses for me, most of the ones that I posted here in the earlier days, and that was such a gift. Classics too, poems that I would never have read if she had not written them in painstakingly clear print and told me why they mattered, why it mattered that there was literature, why it mattered that these words had endured. The honesty and the poetry and the constant reminder that life was beautiful and there was beauty and here are the words, read the words and know that there is more to this life than your mind going crazy and that this will pass. These words were here before you and will be here after you and they are beautiful. And everything she said was true: there was more, it did pass, the words lasted, and they were beautiful.
More than once I've walked/under the sun and beneath the luminous moon/not knowing what or whom to thank.