Lonely No More

It has to do with forgetting. Letting go? At four a.m., rather than go back to bed, the warm billows she is under blankets, I stay up and write poems, mostly bad ones, but one or two okay. The child I was approves. Atop the maple stumps out back, green crystals offered in some vague gesture of healing, some plea for divine forgiveness. Crack the hymnal and what do you find? Yet the chickens do not cry dying, but some of the children watching them die do. Word games with which we are less and less amused, less and less distracted. A surprising offer to swap, which was hard to say no to lest we hurt anybody's feelings, but of course, no. Up so early it might as well be late. We tune our guitars in late afternoon sunlight, run through half a dozen Hank Williams songs, and then it's dusk and time for a new kind of quiet. I was lonely once, but then Christ stepped out of the shadows, and I was lonely no more. Like that, but without drama.