A Resting Place For Innocence

You won’t live remembering starvation and
Fear of the End. Of. Everything.
You won’t know how blood spread across the world.
Twice, and spawned the thought that maybe
Too many of us just didn’t want to live any more;

I fear you may remember other things.

And you won’t remember when the world
Stared for decades at the glowing nuclear flames of Hell
Transfixed. Seduced. Blinded.
But not humbled, even after all that.

But hoping, know it’s a feeble lie, that
You won’t know that.
You won’t know the unending cruelty
Of one to one, many to many, none to one.
That last when a shell of a human is forsaken, and utterly alone.

No. Thankfully.
Not yet.
Not yet, by God.
But you may know other things that I will never see.
Blood-red morning skies filled with dust,
Diving tours to the old Key West Shoals, safari to deepest, darkest Virginia.
Ride the dunes of the Great Nebraska Desert.

Your newness makes me realize I may be the last to know
What a spring morning in the Alleghenies smelled like this morning,
How daffodil yellow hits the heart, after a long time of snow that actually ended.

Thankfully. At least for now. I want to stop the clock
For you, before you know.
To preserve some tiny spark of this
Divine innocence, this spark of the Divine.
And squeeze it into you, down to your core

So you can carry it with you always.
Until you find it and set it free again,
Always new.

Just like you.

*Whew. Sometimes this stuff just sort of bangs on the door. I’m a stenographer at best at times like that. I dunno. A friend just had a new granddaughter, I read about the Pope getting in trouble for telling the truth to people who don’t want to hear it. Again. And some hidden hatch in my damaged brain opened and combined the two into this. I regurgitate, you decide.

Oh… And a glass of wine.