The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

Her body becomes a chapel opened by flame, arched in surrender to a light too holy for flesh. The angel smiles (soft and deliberate) as if he knows ecstasy is edged with death. She breathes not air but radiance, each gasp a half-formed prayer. Her ribs open like shutters and eternity bursts in there. No shame in this trembling. She is the altar, and bride, and lover, and flame, whom God enters not with thunder, but with fire too deep to name. Her body is incandescent— like a moth in a candle flame— every nerve a silver filament burning at the edge of breaking. She cries out without sound, a prayer too fierce for words. She lies in the hush that follows, emptied yet brimming with rapture. Flushed with the glow of Unknowing, she becomes the crystalline Castle where light returns home to itself.