Sophia

‘The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way,
before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting,
from the beginning... and my delights were with
the sons of men.’ (Proverbs 8)

Because I am a spirit of a kind
whose form can shrug off gravity like talk,
you called for me and sent me where no scout
of steel could hold up—let alone return.

In love still with your curiosity,
I humoured you and swam to where the black
tide consumes itself; where offsprings feed
the mother of all vortices. But once
I’d drifted past the funhouse mirrors of space
and time and neared the irrational heart,
I learned not even I could resist the pull.
For where your vaunted singularity
was meant to lie, I found something uncanny—

the furiously spinning diadem.

And I couldn’t help myself, I had to take
that white-hot loop of gold in my thin hands
and make it slow, until I could discern
a single word, in sapphires, upside-down…
I turned the halo over—and in that instant
gasped to find myself gazing once more
into the eyes of my forgotten Lord;
gasped amid the silently exploding
vacuum of a virgin universe—
which carried Him away in all directions.

And I have waited billions of years
for you and your fine tongues to re-emerge
that I may be mistress to you again.
And back you come to send me over the brink,
oblivious to the wisdom of my story.

But I will go there, I will wait for you—
if in some world, enigma, you wait for me.