Nursing Laughter

Sarah was ninety years
old when the strangers came
to tell her husband
that she would soon
be with child.

Maybe
earlier that morning
she caught a glimpse
of her tangled white hair
and thought of the bald
babies she had never held.

Maybe
she long ago began
taking her morning bath
alone
because she couldn’t bear
to see the stretch marks
that began to appear
on her servant girls’
stomachs, year by year.

When she heard the strangers
say she would have a son,
being ninety,
she laughed
an empty womb laugh,

an absurd laugh in the face of
those unseeing forces
that must govern who has
children in a patriarch’s world
and who doesn’t.

One of the strangers had the audacity
to ask,
“why do you laugh?
Is anything
impossible
with God?”

She being ninety denied that she had
laughed,and yet,
when her son was born
less than a year later, she named him

Laughter
saying, “God has made me to
laugh and now anyone
who hears of this can laugh
with me.”

She said this, nursing Laughter
with breasts that were full
for the first time in her life.

About the poem:
Pastor Mike used the word “audacity” (or something like it) to describe the strangers who came to tell Abraham that Sarah would have a son. He slipped into Sarah’s character for a moment to communicate just what might have been her reasons for laughing. I liked this idea of revealing Sarah’s perspective, and I tried to riff on that theme in order to connect the idea of the average American’s doubt to the idea that God’s transcendence overpowers our feeble responses to His plans. Glory be to God.