Proxies

In your white jumpsuit, you look
as small as a rabbit in a pet shop,
only more excited than scared,
and when I see you standing at the edge
of the font, unsure what to do
with the locker key coiled
around your wrist, you look
every one of your eleven years
all at once, and innocence sits lightly
on your shoulder like the dove
that fluttered over Jordan
when Jesus himself was baptized,
and all I can think is how happy I am
that you are happy, that life
has not yet hurt you, that you
still have so much of life to live.
In the font, you grip my arm
while I recite the names of women
long dead, ancestors who, like you,
felt the innocence of girlhood
like a meadow, but who soon felt
each stone of mortality like a fracture
in the bone. They grew old, fell in love,
had happy days and sad, prayed,
pleaded with God and maybe sensed
a silence, dreamed and surrendered,
lived, survived, and died.
And now, as you take upon their names,
one by one, you take upon their lives,
and for a moment, buried together,
you become the same in the eyes of God,
sisters of experience and renewal,
proxies of future and past.

Scott Hales is the author of Hemingway in Paradise and Other Mormon Poems and The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl. His work has been published in Wayfare, Irreantum, BYU Studies, Inscape, Vita Poetica, The Under Review, and a few other places. He lives in Eagle Mountain, Utah.