your mother, the changeling, reaches heaven

Many comparisons have been made 

Between those who were taken in the old country and the new

How on the stillest nights the dread seeps in through the window and carries you with it to the mothership called Tír na nÓg,

And if they see it fit to put you back where you’re supposed to be you’re never quite the same as you were before.

But the key difference between the old takers and the new is this:

Francis, in the first year of his papacy, caused quite a stir when he said he would baptize an alien

That it does not matter which fallen world you were breathed into life on, the destination is the same when you leave it

And Christ died for the Little People too. Back home it is different. Back home they are fallen angels, stuck between this world and the next. 

Here, too, they are said to take from you the living humanness they lack, the one thing they don’t have, but there it is said that they cannot enter the Kingdom without human blood running in their veins. 

And so, in strange communion, they tip you up like honeysuckle and drink. 

In the kitchen, stirring a pot, your mother hums My Sweet Lord and thinks of the second coming of Krishna and of Christ and about the rapture and about how one of these days you’re going to come home and all that will be there is her absence, a corpse of Himalayan silks on a kitchen chair

And everyone will say there are two bodies missing from the pit, 

And everyone will say roll back the stone, the tomb is empty,

And you alone will know the truth and grieve.