The Mezzanine

©2006 by Annabelle A. Udo

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Save my soul from the wretched earth that bleeds
Where temples turn to dust
And the basic needs
Of humanity
Have all run dry.
We look to the sky and wonder “why?”

Praying to a god that we do not see
The Lord Creator of you and me
Who catches us in an invisible net
Lest we jump
Lest we forget.

We know not where we are going
Heaven above or hell below
The humidity of the damned
Sets aglow
the wolverine’s face
that appears by the candlelight
Not speaking
Just staring
The voyeur of your fright.

Death walks through the unlocked door
Beggarman, storekeeper, the town’s local whore
And taps on the shoulder
Of the one who sleeps
Deep
and even deeper
Until they can no longer breathe.

But the beauty of it all
Is really in the living
Of not what was received
But what was in the giving.

So to the ancestral ghosts that follow our ground
Watch our disappointments
Watch the lost become found,
They will always be here to uplift us
From the wreckage of darkness
And the long miles ahead
This life pursued
It is written,
It is said.