A Sestina For My Daughter’s Baptism

Our sweet girl went down to the water on Sunday afternoon. She had been preparing for baptism for weeks and weeks, reading God’s Story, Our Story by Michele Hershberger, and meeting to ask questions and explore the Christian journey with Pastor Matthew and Pastor MaryBeth.

I have a complicated relationship with baptism, with church, and with conflicted relationships where faith is involved, so I was deep in my feelings during the process and on the actual afternoon.

It would take far too long to parse those out here, but I wrote a poem for my sweet girl on the day of her baptism, for myself as one baptized into a messy tradition, and for the big C church welcoming our children into the water. I share it with you here:

Braiding Your Hair Before Baptism

The woman who plunged me into lukewarm holy water

bears the same name as she who walked with you down the muddy

bank of the North River, sparkling with afternoon light.

Twenty years after the woman had plunged me, she told me the victor’s crown

should belong on a head that spit poison, sucked air

from whole churches. Please cover your thoughts in prayer (read, sit down).

Satan is wiley, she typed. God can use the rocks if He wants to. Down

below, you’ll see what I mean: how your argument doesn’t hold water—

keep scrolling. Conflict is in our world’s air,

and I am heart broken because I feel responsible for your muddy

reasoning, for not preparing you for this battle for the spiritual crown.

He’s got a born-again vice-president, she spit. Can’t you see the light?

Mothers are always urging our babies into bright light,

giving ourselves up, bearing down

until children, slippery as Spirit, crown

in a rush of water.

On documentaries, I’ve watched them squat in muddy huts,

suck their own blood out of passages so new lungs have enough air.

My own mother found the air

inside of stained-glass cathedrals to be too stuffy, found light

green between trees and muddy

paths more compelling than Ave Marias. And yet, she still lay down

with me in bath water

and sprinkled my newborn forehead like a crown

of thorns. Or jewels. And so, I braid your auburn hair into a crown

for the day you’ll stand before us, the warm wind, air

you sometimes fear stirring the water,

turning over leaves and dappling the light.

I tightly braid strands of three so when you go down

to the water, you’ll have a Trinity tiara when muddy,

muddy

water surrounds you. I want you to remember the Victor’s Crown

belongs to the poor, the targeted, the ones who lay down

their lives instead of slyly high fiving the Prince of The Air.

What is spoken in the dark will be heard in the daylight,

so you are free to revel in the feel of the water

on your skin. I braid your hair into a crown, watch the water

drip down the forehead I’ve marked for years with kisses, see the light

play on the muddy feet that gather for the moment you are brought up for fresh air.