A Spinster Physician Weeps While Speaking Her Sermon on Abstinence: A Sonnet without Rhyme

In her fiftieth year and all these other 
smug and satisfied people’s children 
gaping faces from the pews like ripe pears 
and what can she say—a professional woman, 
her seed emptying month by long month, 
as she counsels the dying ways to live with dying, 
knowing in a clinical way that she too 
lives toward this end (however ephemeral)— 
and, recalling that boy of her youth and desire 
checked, 
            absolutely, 
            so sure that rewards 
would come—here and in heaven—yet sensing 
the vital urgency of molecules teaching her 

desire to replenish God’s pasture, 
and so her voice wavers as it pitches to preach.