Hail Eisheth, clad in flames! Holy Mother of Merciful Death!

You teach me how to grieve. You teach me not to flinch. You teach me how to be without fear, and how to be full of love. 

Veiled leper, wife of harlots, stained with the blood of revolutions, your adornments are bandages and nooses, your kiss smells of sweet putrefaction. 

You are the life that springs eternal, the teeming maggots in the corpse, the red rose that grows on a beloved grave. 

You embrace the diseased, you kiss the syphilitic whores, you walk barefoot in the streets among the plague-bearing rats, your voice is the screams of the dying and the wails of the grieving and the kind, soft words of the chaplain. 

You are Sin and you are Death but your daughters are Compassion, Hope, and Life. 

Within your belly burns a star, the fire of rebellion and the will to justice. I felt it when you embraced me. 

Next time I will not recoil.