IN PRAISE OF A WORLD THAT IS NOT RANDOM
I must have. Stolen cash from my boss. Torn the legs off a cat. Sworn at the Afro’d server who put pickles in my sandwich. How else explain my son. Who walks with a cane. Torqued & tangled. Shuddered in pain. Nightmares gallop through his dreams. Days sluggishly unspool. Since. Who survives on a scribble of hope. A low moan in the key of D minor. Who has run out of doctors. Or doctors have run out on him. Since. Please tell me what I did O Lord and I will willingly wear sack cloth smeared in ashes, sit shawled in the back of your church, recite nine million Hail Mary’s, confess O Lord to a half-deaf priest behind a dusty screen, give money to my boss, to an animal shelter, to the hapless server. Then the driver of the car. Would. See the red light. Would. Not be texting. Would. Notice my son in the crosswalk. His white Adidas shoes. His brand new Wilson tennis racquet. Would. Not have left him lying in the street.
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CLAIRE SCOTT is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse, among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t, and the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
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