A Member of the Other Team

A Member of the Other Team

(“He asked them, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?’” Acts 19:2)

I do not know if I was kneeling to pray,
or if it was a hit to my blindside that drove me to my knees.
Either way I had been disarmed and
my fears turned to tears turned to sweat
on the turf beneath me.

Shoved down or sunk down,
the game was over,
the jig was up,
the tide was lost.

Some had fallen around me,
some with their faces in the ground.
Some had fallen near me,
some with their eyes to the clouds.
Some stumbled over the noise until
everyone left.  The roar was over, the
music piped
away toward the east, and we picked up
the pieces
of a day when the pieces did not fit.

It was my fear that disarmed me. It was a
shiver I had felt the first time I found I could
not color within the lines. It was the flush I
hated that burned my forehead every time a referee
called my name in front of everyone. It was the
blood that drained from my face when the
public announcer
pointed me out, still wet and prone on the ground.

And then I dreamed. Or so it seemed. There was an opponent,
a member of the other team,
been in the league more years than most and carried
his weight in violence on the field.

I had not moved, my knees ached. And I felt a shadow come
over me from feet, to back, to neck, to arms. I felt a shadow
hover. And then the weight, the sweat of another body mixing
with mine.
He wrapped me like a tent. He covered me. I could move,
but I stayed, confused, dismayed and

Red in the face. But he would not let me loose. He only
shielded me. He did not know, but I wanted to refuse. This
refuge, this covering was far too masculine, and would wound
me
if I moved to escape.

But I was not wounded. I did not break. The muscles in the back of my neck
melted. For a moment this was the universe. For a second,
the lectures disappeared into the abyss. After minutes
I crawled
through the tree-trunk arms and saw the empty field.
We walked the circumference and did not say a word.
For once the wrestling was done.