Lessons to My Younger Self

By Abigail Rose Richards

My mother raised me to treat my body as a temple;

a forbidden sanctuary only open

to its most committed disciples.

With a skeleton of ivory bones for walls,

and capillaries lined with ruby and sapphire.

Skin threaded with opal and platinum,

a heart, a shrine, is drowned in gold.

With emerald windows for eyes,

and two lips; a towering door of titanium.

She is able to withstand any deceptions

in a home for the divine feminines worship.

What my mother did not tell me

is that temples are emphemeral.

False apostles will wage war for all its beauty

and ignite selfish flames of greed.

My dear, your body is not a temple;

it is a forest.

Open field of wheat surrounded by groves of trees,

roots of plants running through the earth like veins,

trickling streams to voluptuous rivers,

with hillside freckles of sweet honeysuckles.

No matter what fires are set upon the fern,

or how the oasis' are dried,

when the fields of what are harvested,

the forest always grows back on its own.