Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Thinking about the soul one bedbound day” by Margarita Papenbrock.

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Thinking about the soul one bedbound day

By Margarita Papenbrock

Well, one sister phone-said the soul will fly

this slow body just a bowl, and death

would pour a real me out, winged and able

I’d be surrounded by the loving dead

But long-deceased Hildegard flipped the body

into the winged soul; the soul at death burps

its holy body out. (She might’ve known

having been ill herself and a smart saint)

Mr. Cohen, also deceased, still sings

a god-y voice revealed my body is

what’s really me. Indivisible soul

and body swirl and bide, clipped or not

And those who had no faith in me divined

my body’s in my shiftless head, my soul

unwell. From afar they cried I should rise

already winged, from non-illness to health

And I hover over the binding bed

for an inanimate minute, another inanimate day

(no calls, no books, no songs, no judgers). I drop

back down, too tried. I am sheet-surrounded

spent mattress springs, flat pillows welcoming

bed and body one, a blanketed joining

no body sees. Who knows about a soul

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Copyright © Margarita Papenbrock

Previously published in the way out is the way in (LCP Chapbook Series, 2021)

Margarita Papenbrock is a part-time tribunal member and poet residing in Saanich on the traditional territories of the W̱SÁNEĆ and lək̓ʷəŋən peoples. She has lived with ME/CFS since 2000.

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