Make Way

(poems go here) I have it down to a science, she told me, her hand on the page, eyes on the boy in the corner. I didn’t believe, but faith, she said, faith will bring you freedom. I brought her a cup of coffee, and she smiled, coffee coloured hair glinting in the place where science gave way and belief could be free. She opened to the red ribboned page, and let out her faith, white-tipped fingers gripping pulpit corners. And as the corner of her eye met the coffee farmer’s, she remembered why faith had been her choice, not her father’s cruel science, with its pedantic pages and empty freedoms. This, this was true freedom, life full to four corners, words falling out of gilded pages and into the paper cups of black coffee at the back plastic table, science irrelevant when looked at in good faith. They, the cup-holders, word-drinkers, the faithful, believed in the voice that rang of freedom and goodness, which told them to defy science and live in their corners, those peaceful tableaus of coffee and children and scattered pages. But now these slow pages of their lives have grown old, their faith dulled as she did, the coffee, drunk and soured; having tasted the freedom of a world without corners they have left her for her enemy. For science. And as she lays, coffee-hair now white in corners, across the tattered pages that once held her freedom, she weeps; because she alone has no faith in science.