Subtext of a Prayer    

by Claire Massey
                                                                                                           

Wouldn’t it be sublime
if Buddhists and Hindus,
Plato and Socrates,
had been right to tout
alternate designs for atonement,
orders allowing
bonus seasons, lifetimes for amending
karmic grievances?

Who wants an eternity
of retrospection
in some white infinity
unmercifully distant
from this blue planet?

We pray for redemption by whatever means
the master planner decreed
but what we want
is the easy penance
of Return, another April to flirt
with green eyed spring, court
her tease of sun on skin,
brush of plumpened lips
and then,
her loamy breath, the quickening kiss.


* * * * *

Claire Massey is the Poet Laureate for the Pensacola, Florida branch of National Pen Women. She was a selection editor for the 2019 print edition of The Emerald Coast Review. Among other publications, her work appears or is forthcoming in Persimmon Tree, Panoply, Wilderness House Literary Review, Flights 2020 Magazine and Saw Palm: Journal of Florida Art and Literature.