Sundays

Sundays

Sundays everywhere were shut.
Closed up tight as a pious pew.
The stone smugness of the churches
with captured, captivated, congregations.

Sunday was a prison, confining,
conforming and confirming
through the conservation
of ritual and ritualistic thought,
constrained by tradition
and the weight of authority.

Sunday was a corpse, as dead
as the surrounding graveyard,
high on the hill above the village,
where the graves stood their ground,
sentries against the possibility of dissent.