Sundays

Let us be precise.

Sunday is not a tribunal
before which your soul is judged.

It is a mechanism—
a small machine of revenue.

And the coins that fall from it
become other things:

education,
the liberty of your own mind,
journeys toward destinations known and unknown
hours among people
for whom your presence requires no disguise.

Thus the meaning alters.

Your nerves still interpret the day
as an ancient signal:

Here gathers the tribe
that never absorbed you.

But adulthood speaks in another grammar:

This contract finances
the tribe that does.

No mysticism is required for this thought.
It is an economic statement.

You are not proclaiming belief.

You are exchanging skill for capital,
capital for autonomy,
autonomy for the freedom
to choose your companions.

A clear chain of causes.

The body, however, is conservative.
Attachment remembers longer
than reason.

For a time the tightening remains.

Yet the inner sentence may change.

Instead of saying:

I am outside again.

You might say quietly:

This room pays for that one.

Do not dismiss the sentence as irony.
It is a way of touching ground.

You already possess evidence
that belonging without intellectual surrender
is possible.

After exile
this is not common.

The grief that visits on Sundays
mourns a tribe that never cohered,
not in childhood,
not in blood.

Let the grief speak.
It has its dignity.

But it no longer describes
your present condition.

You are not a man
circling the gate of a village
that refuses him.

You are a man
who has found another village
and for a time
draws provisions from the first.

Strategy, not humiliation.

There is even a small irony in it.

The institution that once signified
conditional belonging
now finances
a belonging without conditions.

Such inversions matter.

Therefore, before entering on Sunday,
name the exchange clearly.

Today funds the ticket.
Today funds the study.
Today funds the work.

The mind learns meaning through repetition.
Soon the body may follow.

The wound remains, yes—
origin wounds are stubborn creatures—
but you have stopped asking
the wrong structure to heal it.

Belonging has already moved.

And the warmth you remember
in that hearth
is evidence.

Consider it carefully:

When the thought of places
return to you now,

does the tightening
ease,

even a little?