The night I decided there was no soul

Was like any other night,

Maybe darker, and in early December

Here in the hills, there was already

As much snow as the past two global warming

Winters combined.

And it was cold, in the low teens,

As it had been now for a dozen days,

But it was really just another ordinary night.

The moon was a sliver in the sky and stars sheathed

The night I concluded there was no soul,

That we were bodies, completely.

It was hardly an epiphany!

As I’d been debating this question for decades,

But it was shattering nonetheless,

The night I realized how truly mad

This mad fabrication, this imaginative fantasy of

The separation of body and soul

Body and mind

Body and spirit.

The myth…

One survived

Death,

That the body,

“The cathedral of the soul”

That the soul morphed! into something winged,

Or wise, glorious, or beautiful, but certainly

Above it all,

Whilst the body

Bloated and putrefied,

Dripped decaying under the earth.

 

© Susan Lynn Gesmer, The Night I Decided There Was No Soul, December 2007