Hold her prayers close,
like those embers she’s tossed
upon bloodstained clothes
laid upon that floor
like strewn debris.
What a face. In its marble exterior,
she performs a display
of enigmatic desperation,
beautiful in reddest dread
towards those she called children,
towards those who are dead.
Lifelong to be white,
in all her crude complexion –
sobbing to a faint beat
of her grieving heart.
Shallowest marks entrench her
like footsteps, beneath her eyes.
To memories she forgets,
she brings back in coldest
repercussion,
silencing all teardrops to spring
in its rebirth, whenever she
springs herself upon hope.
She crawls, like a newborn
to decay. She rots,
wondering at what she cannot
find in herself to say –
at a prayer this close
to Heaven.
Her words hurled ahead,
to be stones in a graceful culling
of her grief, of everything
she clings to, beneath
God, who weeps
for this woman, who lays down,
at last, asleep.
Modern Romanticism 