To Micah, On the Removal of Your Appendix

~ Susanna Childress Which, of all the names of our human story— gorgeous as the sound of Goethe—will prick like a vaccination the whole sweet mess of your hitherto undaunted body? You, little historian, sleeping the heavy slumber of the great black bear in December, my dear and only brother, who shall call to you? Not Napoleon or Stonewall Jackson, not Thucydides or Heraclitis, not Martin Luther, not Meriwether Lewis. Not Frederick Douglas, not precious Nathan Hale. O no, not you, Ronald Reagan. Come, Mechtild of Magdeburg, say How God Comes to the Soul, descending on the beloved as dew on a flower, as even dew on the open palm of a flower.