(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.