You’ve forgotten the names of your homemade saints
who crowd in the dark behind your thin lids.
In the veil you’ve drawn between
Here and Not Here,
they pray for your release
whether you believe in them or not.
In the neither here nor not-here light
where it’s always four in the morning
their candles illuminate golden Memory;
their prayers waver in the flickering light
between night and a hell of your own making.
As you toss under heavy down, you reach
for Memory: The owl emerges who stared from a
naked branch in yesterday’s pre-dawn walk.
She appears here for a night of immovable blessings
each blink of her thick-lidded silence brings
one more letter of your unnamed saints into being.
The letters form names.
You remember:
who believes in you, sees light
in your darkness—your rabbi, your bubby,
your prophets—all unsanctioned,
all saints none-the-more.
You wake under feathers; homemade saints assure|
All dark forgotten
All dark forgiven.
Bliss Goldstein’s been published in HuffPost, LA Times, Judith Magazine, and CALYX, where she won the Margarita Donnelly Prize for Prose Writing. She’s also been nominated for Best on the Net. Her piece in HuffPost went viral and her novel-in-progress “Cult Momma” is drawn from that true story. Bliss taught writing at Western Washington University and has an MLA from Stanford University. Find more bliss at blissgoldstein.com.
Featured image “Candle in Paris” Uploaded by Barbara-Ingeborg to be licensed via creative commons 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
