Not
Nuns
by
Mary M. Brown
The
nones I know (not
nuns
—not
nuns by a long
shot)
but
nones,
the ones who say
none
when
asked, “Religious
affiliation?”—
like those other
nuns,
have given up
some
things, not men or sex
or
children of their own, but
scripture and ritual, done
with
all that nonsense,
–or
maybe those are things
they
have never known.
None of the nones I know
are
in the habit of meanness,
greed, sloth, cruelty or any
ungodliness.
They are none
of those things we religious
folk
might wish they were to
justify
our own incessant
hunger
for church, our failure to
know
the holy in the daily,
to
realize none of us knows
much of the uncanny divine,
no
priest or rabbi, shaman or nun,
none of us able to
understand
or
unravel much more than the nones.
Mary
M. Brown
lives and writes in Anderson, Indiana. She taught literature and
creative writing at Indiana Wesleyan University for many years. Her
poetry appears on the Poetry Foundation and American Life in Poetry
websites, in Plough, Third Wednesday, Quiddity, JJournal, and many
other journals and magazines.