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 Stephen A. Schmidt
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 Amy L. Florian
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 		     Reflections on the Mystery of Suffering Volume 19 Number 2
Summer, 2000

 

For Sophie, Bald in Church

by Jill P. Baumgaertner
The others on whom cancer
also closes in wear wigs or scarves
but your head is bare
 
and smooth as a peach
You wear it cleanly
and there is no Auschwitz
 
agony in your eyes although
you also know that the other type of
baldness sour and silent. But now you
 
ask about what happens later-
if the soul hovers in the out there
floating in dreams waiting
 
for the body to catch up
And we in our habitual pews
sit behind you and see the cross
 
through the penumbra of your
head - naked as an infant
still curling into its mother.
Reprint from Second Option with permission of author.
 
Jill P. Baumgaertner is a Professor of English at Wheaton College