It’s June when she’s burned at the stake,
lavender blooming in French fields, lilacs
beginning to fade, their honeyed scent
mingling with smoke as onlookers weep
to watch flames licking her naked flesh,
but she doesn’t flinch, she will not recant
even though this is the price she pays for
believing the Divine Spark, gifted from
birth, resides within each of us, nor does
she know that seven hundred years will
pass before she comes to light as the woman
who writes that her Soul so burned in Love’s
fiery furnace, she feels no fire, for she is fire,
the fire of Love.
This poem appears in the June 2023 issue.
