Sermon and confessional were born from grief. Since experiencing it first-hand, I have struggled to make sense of my religious upbringing in light of tragedy, and to find faith where there is none. My memory has worsened, as has my fear of impending doom. In times of doubt, I find myself recalling events arbitrarily, filling in the gaps with tales rather than facts, questioning whether things happened at all. I often wonder if the people who left me did so for a reason. If they were plagued by horrific visions or whisked away by divine will. In sermon, I observe their vanishing in search of answers. In confessional, I recreate their final days in search of meaning. 
 

The idea was to connect the two pieces from different points of view. When writing, I like to choose a specific set of themes, patterns, and symbols as the heart of a poem. It’s about establishing motifs that mirror each other until they break down. This time I was inspired by stories of Catholic saints who had revelations, and by the Greek chorus as a foretelling entity. These voices haunt the soon-to-be missing person and anticipate the loneliness of sermon. They cannot delay the inevitable, only announce it. In that sense, the poem is meant to be sung like a prophecy - from the slow realization of undoing to the undoing itself. 

At the climax, my goal was to return everything to a very elementary state of being. Where real is imaginary, death is rebirth, and missing memory is reclaimed by a prehistoric sea. I hope to have given the people who left a chance to return, too.