Darker Days

A short narrative experience about losing your faith and sacrificing the life you thought you wanted on the altar of truth. Poem extract below from "Ash Prayer," published in Peculiar 2017:

"Forgive us now our dreams
carried on paper,
carried on flames,
carried on winds of change,
spiraling up like papacy.
Here is my confidence, my eternity,
here are all the lives we’ll never live:
here is love, that sputters in the
Conflagration. Here is innocence, and
here truth. Now with an uppercase,
Here is God, in these shreds, these tattered
garments, bits of Osiris ascending to Himself,
and I the virgin. I the heron, I the knock-kneed crane
with fish and loaves caught in its gullet.

Why do the heavens shed their light
so soon? Why did we think
we could shut our eyes and
the dawn would linger, when
all we gathered was ashes
and all we feared was burning?"