RELIGION Poem: Canvas of Love, by Johanna Clark

A stretched breath of linen, hushed and waiting.
Bathed in the fold of the watching sun.
A nail, driven deep by a carpenter’s hand,
Clasps the fabric tender.

No stain, no smudge, no sinning strike,
Only light shifting, soft as a whispered hymn.

In the silence of slow time,
I feel the hands that faced the firmament,
That stretched the dawn within a single breath.
As Michelangelo’s brush met the ceiling of the Chapel,
God’s outstretched hand reached towards Adam.
Oh, what steady love and quiet devotion
Shapes the world in hues of mercy.

The light withdrawals and with it, His voice.
Yet, my hands tremble, painted in ruin-
Crimson, ochre caught in the seams of my skin.

I have tried to love as He does.
Before me, the canvas sighs—
No longer pale, no longer sure,
Now echoing human love:
The reaching, the flawed attempt,
The play we perfect in pretense.

Here, what love has touched, love has altered.
And when the dawn returns,
It will not enter on perfection,
But in what I have made.