please bring strange things

Please bring strange things to the christening. The child is of age and has a name but no experience.

Bring ridged things, spiked things, keen things, and things with teeth that bite.

Bring things that flow like water but are not. Things like silk, but not silk — some new fabric with the sheen of silk and the feel of oil on the fingers. Make it purple, but not a shade we have seen before.

Bring scented things delicious and foul. Sweet scents of maybe-vanilla, so familiar but not known, tasted but yet untasted. Foul scented things that are and are not the reek of a midden heap.

Bring an instrument of strings or wind or percussion. No, not the ones we have heard. Something unheard.

She must learn.

© Siobhan Ernest Lancosova 2024

Prompt:

Initiation Song from the Finders’ Lodge

Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
walk mindfully, well loved one,
walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
be always coming home.

—Ursula K LeGuin