I argued all afternoon today
with my Christian friend about The Rapture.
She sat with her infant on her lap
and gushed about being taken.

Taken where?  Away and up.
Her hearty baby sucked on a spoon;
she said she knew it would happen soon.
I wondered why, then, I couldn’t come.

She told me because it’s in the Bible—
that God takes only faithful Christians,
their souls unsoiled, to live with Him.
She looked at the baby and echoed his babble.

I tried to imagine them vanishing before
my eyes—would they simply dematerialize,
or be lifted up by beams of light,
and carried off through spaceship doors?

Later, I saw the shadow of a plane—
like a whale’s enormous underbelly—
swiftly graze across a hilly
field, and a thought kept forming: a refrain—

that larger things above us
can only be seen through shadows,
left for us to decipher, below—
divinity found in hushes—

the rests between the notes—answers
we keep waiting for to land.
I want to be lifted up like hands
of a crowd, see it, fall, and shiver.

– Logan Chace