Today's poem is by Kelly Rowe

Prayer for Reconciliation
       

In the study that a child playing hide and seek
once called the messy room,
in a drawer, in a manila envelope, still sealed,
I've filed the police report on how you died.
It will stay put: it will age, though you don't.
I'll open it today.
I'll never open it.

Here, photographs spill out of boxes, and you
return, a small boy perched on a stoop
in tiger pajamas. You grin, flashing
little white cub teeth; you claw at the blue sky
beyond a black and white world.
You are about to climb a tree, to grow
feathers, to rise, to become cloud.

God, come to me.
You know I'm an unbeliever,
but I can't open that envelope alone.
Gather in all the small lights
that flicker across the universe
and make a torch; hold it high,
lead me into the cave

where tigers gnawed on bones,
where trapped birds flapped and dropped,
through the narrow passage
into the great room, where, now illuminated
on the high wall—horses thunder,
legs curled, legs reaching out in flight,
shoulder to shoulder, sister and brother, above

the river they rise—one great gold mane
streaming endlessly back.

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Copyright © 2023 Kelly Rowe All rights reserved
from Rise above the River
Able Muse Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission